


A Scatter of Echoes

by Elialys



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (i think), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst and Humor, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Episode AU: s04e13 Journey's End, Rescue Missions, Reunions, Suicide Attempt, Telepathic Bond, Telepathy, Yes there is humor, not a tragedy, now some warnings, this tag is important
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2020-11-24 16:23:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 35,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20910587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elialys/pseuds/Elialys
Summary: "She’s an echo all right, a ghost that haunts his every excruciating passing second…and those vestigial ripples that keep surging through his mind are like razor blades, cutting through his grey matter and whatever’s left of his singular heart."A tragic accident leaves the (human) Doctor devastated and spiralling down...to the point where the Prime Doctor has no choice but to get involved.Or how not everything is as it seems.





	1. I.

**Author's Note:**

> A few things. First of all, a giant thank you to Vicky for literally giving me the backbone of this story. Most of the plot points in this story were her ideas, which makes things that much easier for me, because I mostly get to play around with the characters without brainstorming as much as usual xD
> 
> Second of all, I need to discuss the relationship tags and trigger warnings. The ‘implied character death’ is Rose’s, just putting it out there, since it becomes clear about three lines in. Although I’ll also point out the fact that I tagged this story ‘angst with a happy ending’ for a reason. I’m not going to say it yet to try and keep some ~semblance of mystery, but you know…it will end well for my OTP *WINK WINK* In terms of relationships, I am adding the Ten x Rose tag to this story because there will be interactions between them, but this is a Tentoo x Rose story, romantically speaking, and Tentoo x Rose are endgame. 
> 
> In terms of trigger warnings: death of a loved one, hence intense grief. Alcoholism. Attempted suicide.
> 
> Can you tell my muse overdosed on the fluff lately? This is payback, I guess. Although I dare say the second half of this chapter might be more entertaining than you think. Just…get through the first half, and trust me to make it better, in the end, yeah?

**A SCATTER OF ECHOES**

**I.**

Time.

He used to think of time as a concept that existed outside the realm of the quantitative.

Such a fickle thing, time. Altered by many factors, like speed, or the mere fact that every observer experiences it slightly differently.

All things considered, time did not use to mean much to him – a Time Lord.

The notion of ‘passing time’ is rather abstract when one possesses the ability to go back or go forth however one wishes.

Not anymore.

Time grinds away at him, now.

Every single second stretches at a pace that is _painstakingly_ slow. They tick, then they tock, one by one by one, until sixty of them add up and complete a whole minute.

Repeat the process again and again, until eventually, an hour has gone by.

Time does not relent in this body. Time just _is_.

Fifty years, he’s got left.

Roughly four-hundred-thousand hours. Over twenty-six million minutes.

Converted into seconds, the number becomes so long that _exponents_ have to be used to describe it.

_Billions _of them, seconds; ticking and tocking away.

One…

…by one…

….by one…

Every single one of them, he’s got to live without her.

…

He’s developed a few habits of late – none of which are the _good _kind of habits.

One of them has him entering the nearest corner store some time before midnight, right around the time his hands begin to shake from withdrawal.

There’s no coincidence in his new routine.

He knows he’s being watched, from the moment he leaves the flat to the moment he goes back in. He’s being stared at the way humans simply can’t help but stare at anything upsetting or slightly off-putting. There is a quiet sort of contempt in those stares or glances, along with a good deal of revulsion, when he doesn’t wash for a while.

There’s the occasional _compassion_, of course, and those are the worst kind.

He ignores the looks, just like he ignores the fact that the cashiers at this particular store all know him by sight, now, if not by name. He can’t very well tell them ‘Hello, I’m the Doctor!’ while handing over the couple of bottles they know will pull him right back from this burgeoning hangover into full inebriety.

They don’t say anything either, because he never causes trouble the way other drunks might, and he always lets them keep the change when he pays for his poison. All they can do is stare at him the way many do, whenever he ventures outside.

They watch as his face becomes more taut and his skin turns waxier and his beard grows longer, his already loose clothes only getting looser with every passing day, his skinny frame well on its way to being bony, now.

He’s got what most people call ‘a drinking problem’.

It could be argued that he’s too smart, much too smart to have allowed himself to enter this kind of self-destructive spiral, but brains have little to do with this particular matter. He _knows_ what this constant excess of alcohol is doing to his organs and tissues. He _knows_ what the long term effects are.

He _knows_, and he doesn’t care, going as far as welcoming the notion that most of his vital systems in this part-human body might shut down before the end of this Earth year.

See, the thing is, he doesn’t just have a ‘drinking problem’. He’s got a ‘broken heart’ problem, too, and that one…

That one will be responsible for his entire soul shattering, in the end.

It bloody _hurts_.

The nausea sure doesn’t help. Neither does the headache but…the headache’s always there.

He’s particularly shaky today when he reaches for his usual night-time companions on the shelf, the glass bottles clinking against one another, until he presses them to his chest, pushing against his sternum and squeezing to put a stop to the sound. He waited longer than usual to come out, tonight, and it shows.

It wasn’t by choice.

The voice, her voice, had stirred him from his state of drunken-unconsciousness, and while he’d _tried_ to make it to the bathroom, he’d already started vomiting by the time he was reaching the toilet.

Now he truly doesn’t care about what people think of him these days, but whatever ounce of dignity he had left forced him into the shower, hence the tardiness. It had been, overall, a terrible idea. The water had cleared more than acerbic juices from his skin and beard, clearing off his head, too, until his thoughts were sharper than they’d been in days.

As water battered his slowly decaying body, the memory of her voice lingered _inside_ his mind, in that space that used to be so warm and full to the brim with her; it’s been throbbing for weeks, now, quaking with emptiness, with that absence of her.

_Doctor…_

He doesn’t miss the irony in this. In how he’d once reached out for her across the Void, causing her to experience something similar. She’d told him that much, at some point this past year; described it to him as an echo that rippled through her dreamscape.

Well, maybe not in so many words.

_“I could…feel you, in my mind, I mean. Heard you calling.”_

The problem is that she’s not trapped on the other side of the Void, this time.

She’s trapped in a wooden casket, under a few feet of dirt, her flesh rotting much faster than his, much too fast for him to ever hope to catch up.

She’s an echo all right, a ghost that haunts his every excruciating passing second…and those vestigial ripples that keep surging through his mind are like razor blades, cutting through his grey matter and whatever’s left of his singular heart.

He shouldn’t have waited. He’s too…sober.

He feels too aware of his clothes, which are in need of washing, too, their fabric almost too heavy for his weakened muscles and aching bones. He can’t remember the last time he ate food, either, and he supposes he should worry about that.

He doesn’t.

They used to come to this store, before. For food.

Not often, though. By the time his whole world came crashing down, they’d gotten better at doing this ‘routine’ thing, almost managing to squeeze in a proper ‘full week worth of grocery’ session on a weekly basis.

But there had been times when whatever was in the fridge hadn’t been enough, when it hadn’t been what they were craving for.

There’d been nights when they’d wanted _ice cream_ at two in the morning after indulging into another kind of sweet activity, and they’d been shameless about going to the corner store in their pyjamas…a tad obnoxious and definitely too handsy, intoxicated on each other more than they could ever be on drinks or illegal substances.

Oh, he’s waited too long…

The memories are too sharp, her ghost almost corporeal. Two bottles won’t cut it, tonight.

He’s reaching out for a third one, when it happens again.

_Doctor…_

He misses the neck of the bottle, his shock causing him to sweep his hand across the shelf instead, and glass goes crashing onto the floor, spilling ethanol all over his feet.

He’s apologetic when the clerk comes to assess the damage, shaking so much at this point that it’s a miracle he doesn’t drop the other two bottles he’s still cradling in his arms. Inside his mind and right through his chest, pain throbs, more acutely than it has in ages, his head aching and spinning from the hurt and the fumes.

He gets a hundred pounds note out of his pocket and thrusts it into the clerk’s hand, before escaping into the night, clinging to his liquor the way he used to cling to her.

Time, like grief, is ruthless.

It cannot be stopped, that is a scientific fact. But he can put a stop to his awareness of it.

That is a fact, too.

///

From the inside of the TARDIS, one cannot tell whatever is happening right on the outside of it.

She does pride herself on how well insulated she is. Whenever her Time Lord and his companion(s) step outside and the doors lock, she goes onto standby, the noises of her time rotor quieting down to a low hum, bluish green light keeping the control room slightly lit, just so.

And as it so often happens, the moment the main door opens again, she sparks back into life.

Especially when, like today, the door doesn’t open as much as it _bursts_ open.

“Start up the sequence!” the Doctor orders as he slams his entire body against the door, which unfortunately is not closing properly, a couple of tentacles having managed to slip through the gap.

There is a non-negligible amount of slimy mucus dripping from the Time Lord, from the tip of his not-exactly-stylish-at-the-moment hair to the inside of his chucks.

“What d’you think I went up there to do, you numb nut?!” Shouts his equally-slimy companion, already up to the console indeed, twisting knobs and pulling levers – although not as effortlessly as usual, all that alien goo getting in the way.

‘Companion’ really isn’t the right title for the (mostly) human occupant sharing the Doctor’s hectic life, these days.

‘Unintentional Twin’ would be more appropriate.

“Donna!” the Doctor shouts, elongating that last syllable in a familiar, high raising pitch, his sliminess having led to a variety of his limbs stretching and spreading at rather uncomfortable angles, incidentally making it a tad difficult for him to squish those tentacles out.

“Oh, shut it,” Donna replies, unbothered, pressing one last button, and the beautiful sounds of the ship starting her dematerialisation sequence fill up the room.

The last of the tentacles slip out, and the door closes shut, the Doctor unable to keep himself from sliding to the floor in a flurry of squeaky noises, still lubricated from head to toe.

He remains there, staring at the coral overhead, relishing in the feel of his ship vibrating beneath him.

Donna’s face comes into view, staring down at him like she’s got half a mind to open that door again and push him out.

“You. Arse.” She states, slime dripping from her nose onto his.

“What?” he asks in false indignation – he does know _what_.

“You’ve got to _stop_ offering my hand in marriage to every oppressive dictator we try to overturn.”

“Oh c’mon, it’s a brilliant tactic!” he protests. “You know I’ll never let it go as far as the actual consummation, although I _did_ cut it a tad close this time, I’ll give you that.”

“You think?” Donna huffs, and when he reaches out a hand, hoping she’ll help him up, she merely takes a hold of her hair and starts twisting it, squeezing a long stream of goo out of it, until it’s oozing down neatly into his eyes and mouth. “Now now,” she shushes him when he makes wet noises of protest beneath her. “Weren’t you babbling about how _good_ for the skin Lexokit’s slime is, not ten minutes ago, while we were running for our lives?”

“You know it is!” he replies, offended, clumsily trying to get himself into a more seated position, but she pushes her foot onto his chest, keeping him to the ground. “The Lexokits are known throughout this part of the universe for their intergalactic brand of moisturising products! You were the one complaining about wrinkles the other – ”

“Oi!” she shuts him up, actually leaning down and raising a hand in warning.

“All right, I’m sorry!” he exclaims, trying to protect himself from any incoming blow.

“Not good enough," she says with a shake of her head, pressing her foot harder onto his ribs. “I want you to say it.”

“Very well,” he sighs in defeat. “I promise not to use you as a decoy bride anymore. At least not without your consent.”

Donna appears to ponder on the authenticity of his words for a moment, before tilting her head. “It’ll do.” She finally reaches down for his arm, grabbing it and helping him back up onto his feet.

As soon as she releases him, he sinks both his hands into his hair and squeezes, before sliding his fingers upward in an impromptu hairdo. “Let’s look on the bright side, eh? Free hair gel!” he notes with his trademark cocky grin.

Across from him, Donna is now rubbing the goo onto her face. “And my skin’s gonna be as smooth as a baby’s bottom!”

They stare at each other in their similar gooey state, before they burst into short yet genuine laughter. For all of her complaining, the Doctor knows Donna wouldn’t have it any other way.

He certainly wouldn’t, regularly wondering what state he would be in by now if they hadn’t managed to get her metacrisis under control and he’d lost her, too.

“Alright, enough of this crap, I need a shower,” Donna is now saying, already on her way out of the control room.

The Doctor does exactly that, too, spending a significantly lengthier amount of time in the bathroom, as his hair does require some fixing after it’s been cleaned and dried.

When he joins her back into the control room some time later, he’s not at all surprised to find her at the console, obviously absorbed in the reading of some data – not an uncommon occurrence these days, as she’s become equally able to pilot his ship.

He is, however, startled by the look on her face.

“What is it?” he asks, and there is no humour in his voice, now, sensing a shift in the air as she meets his eyes.

She indicates the monitor with a tilt of her chin. “Come take a look.”

He does, propping his specs on as he leans closer to the screen.

Understanding sets in at once, in the form of a heavy weight in the pit of his stomach. He looks away from the screen, down into Donna’s eyes. “It’s not possible,” he says, thickly.

Donna tilts her head again, slowly this time, in that way of hers that tells him she _knows_ he knows better. And it’s not that he’s made it a habit to lie to his companions, but he’s always been rather good at…withholding certain things he deemed necessary to withhold.

He cannot quite do that anymore, not with the person who shares a good chunk of his knowledge, along with a few of his most formative core memories.

“We both know better,” she says the words out loud anyway, and already, there is some urgency in her voice, her face uncharacteristically pale. “This distress signal comes from a TARDIS, Doctor. And there’s only one other TARDIS in existence that we know of.”

There is a nudge in his mind, familiar yet insistent, his own TARDIS’ way of letting him know she’s in on this all right, urging him to get his psychic paper out.

The Doctor does just that, with fingers that would be trembling if he wasn’t controlling his own reactions. He opens it up, both he and Donna able to read what is written there in thick, dark letters:

** _HELP HIM_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, so I didn’t want to tag ‘Donna Noble’ yet to try and keep at least ONE THING a surprise after that giant note full of spoilers haha. This is me literally waving canon goodbye and embracing the beauty that is fanfiction. The Doctor deserved to keep his BFF after JE and the sacrifice he made, that is a fact, one that I will use fully in this story.
> 
> Once again, remember my ‘angst with a happy ending’ tag ;-) 
> 
> Comments/kudos are such a great motivator, especially when starting a new story. I'd love to know who's in for the ride! ^^


	2. II.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Donna watches as all three incarnations of the Doctor run, in a rapid succession of memories, Rose’s hand clasped in theirs, as if trying to outrun the tide of time."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your support, and for trusting me with your feels. It will get better. Once again, the first half of this chapter is a bit hard. Hopefully the second half will make it a bit better ;-)

**II.**

He downs most of his first bottle on his way back to the flat. Considering how short the distance between the two buildings is, that’s saying something.

By the time he’s closing the door behind him, he’s opened the second one, the numbness spreading, although it’s nowhere as liberating as it used to be. It _used_ to be enough, the alcohol hijacking his brain and putting an end to the occasional echoes that still throbbed through his mind like some residual nerve damage in the aftermath of a vicious injury.

It’s not enough tonight.

_Doctor…_

The whisper of her voice lingers through neurons and synapses, driving him mad. Allowing her into his head in the first place was a mistake.

As if allowing her into his hearts hadn’t been trouble enough.

But just as it’d been with the latter, there was very little he was able to do about the former. He never _decided_ to fall in love with her, the way he never _meant_ to forge a proper telepathic connection with her.

That’s the thing about intimacy. When it’s genuine enough, those things tend to happen pretty much on their own.

Well.

One of them being naturally telepathic helped a bit, too.

It was already too late when he’d become aware of that bond he was forming with her, rooted deep within his mind. Instead of letting it be as it was, or even trying to find a way to quell it, they’d _nurtured _it.

They may have been grounded to Earth, their curiosity remained as insatiable as it’d once been. Of course they’d experimented with it, especially when they realised their progress was helping their infant TARDIS grow. And having someone in his head again, _properly_ there, after centuries of silence…

The rush and warmth of her had been addictive, her mind as mesmerising to him as her smile or that look in her eyes.

Months of practice had paid off, to the point where they didn’t need physical contact anymore to spark open their link.

In retrospect, despite all of his initial denial and rather extreme behaviours that day, he’d known she was gone long before anyone told him what happened, long before he saw the body.

He could lie to himself all he wanted, that…_emptiness_ could not lie.

Weeks later, her amputated presence in his mind has become his phantom limb, aching and throbbing even though there’s nothing _there_ to explain the sensation.

He drinks for the same bloody reasons any miserable fool drinks: because drinking alters his neurotransmitters and confuses these pathways in his brain.

He drinks because Rose is dead, and he’s not.

Slumped against the door with his eyes closed, while ethanol quickly seeps into his veins, it’s too easy to picture her as she would be, leaning against the bedroom’s jamb, staring at the sorry state of him, feeling more sympathetic than anything else despite his inexcusable behaviour, because that’s what Rose did, that’s what she always did.

But when he opens his eyes and looks at that doorway, it’s empty.

_Doctor…_

Bile and alcohol rises up in his throat as he lets out a wounded noise, his fingers reaching for his hair and clutching, forgetting that he’s still holding on to an open bottle, soon smelling the liquid spilling over himself more than he feels it.

There’s just no escaping her.

If she were just a ghost he saw in familiar places, the way she used to be all over his TARDIS after Canary Wharf, he might be able to cope, eventually, to get a grip on himself and drag himself out of this pit.

But she’s carved too deep inside his brain, and he can’t breathe.

He’s made it to the bathroom, somehow, finding himself holding the bottle of pills that were prescribed to him to help him sleep. He takes a few, swallowing them down with more alcohol.

He takes more than he should.

He lets himself fall upon the bed, upon the side that used to be hers, grabbing for the pillow that lost her scent long ago, after countless nights spent clutching it to his chest, his face buried in it. As he loses sensations in his limbs, he begs his mind to offer him some peace.

He lets himself go deep, deeper than he’s been since he lost her, disconnecting from this human body in every way one can disconnect, seeking her in other ways as unconsciousness wraps him up in a semblance of comfort and nothingness.

When the Doctor opens his eyes, he’s standing in the middle of a busy London street, in bright daylight.

It’s crowded, and noisy, and there is a lingering smell of _chips_ in the air.

He feels pressure against his arm, and looks down, meeting hazel eyes that are framed with dark eyeliner, her lashes a tad too thick. She squeezes the leather of his jacket again, letting the smallest of smiles pull at the corner of her lips.

“There’s me,” she reminds him softly, with all the innocence and compassion of her young soul.

And just as she did back then, this gentle Rose becomes a seed, a seed that buries itself deep between his hearts.

He lets her.

///

Materialising in the other universe using both the spatial and time coordinates sent to them by the young TARDIS is not as impossible as a certain Time Lord claims it to be.

From the moment she met the Doctor, Donna came to redefine the meaning of the word ‘impossible’.

Now that she actually shares most of his intellect, the idea of anything being_ impossible_ has become nothing short of laughable.

Oh, he whines and protests about all kind of things, of course, pretexting that there are laws that need to be obeyed, traditions that must be upheld, that the ‘fragile balance’ that keeps the cosmos from being completely pulled into chaos cannot be disturbed, blah-de-blah-blaaaaaah.

She usually shuts him up by reminding him that the _time machine_ they’re merrily using was actually stolen.

By him.

He was always a smart bloke, there is no denying that. But Donna’s got the kind of smarts one does not acquire by attending Time Lord nursery school. She’s got the smarts of someone born and raised in Chiswick, who’s spent most of her adult life temping because she couldn’t conform to the ‘kissing arse’ attitude and social inequalities that came with most jobs.

Mix that kind of smarts with the kind of stuff one _does_ learn by attending Time Lord nursery school, and you get an individual who snorts at the word ‘impossible’.

Snorts, cackles, guffaws, rather loudly, too. He hates when she does that – which, evidently, is why she does it quite often.

She’s not laughing today, nothing in the current situation warranting as much as a smile, but she’s not letting him get away with his ‘_it’s impossible’_ crap either.

She’s known from the moment they left the other universe for what was supposed to be ‘the last time’ that going back there wouldn’t be as unfeasible as her heartbroken Time Lord claimed it to be. Sure, the walls between their realities had mended, but you don’t have to be a genius to understand that anything that’s been damaged heals up with peculiar…scar tissues, with sensitive areas that are more vulnerable – soft spots, you might call them.

And as it so happens, Donna _is_ a genius.

Her fingers play the console the way a concert pianist plays the piano – masterfully, and with a bit of panache, too, thank you very much. She doesn’t connect to the TARDIS telepathically the way the Doctor does, as it is one ability she hasn’t gained in the genetic mingle that took place a few months back, but she knows the sentient ship recognises her and her authority just as much as she does his – if not more, on occasions.

The Doctor lets her lead this particular rescue mission, already back to being his mute, taciturn self, as she fully expects him to be at this point. To say that the ‘Rose’ topic is a thorny one would be a bit of an understatement – pun intended. She doesn’t know where her alien would be if not for her and her more…reasonable approach on things, as he’d behaved rather questionably on a few occasions after their trip to Bad Wolf Bay.

Not that she blames the poor bloke. As someone who’s once been dumped for a giant spider on her wedding day, she can sort of relate to having the love of your life getting her happily-ever-after with a hybrid version of yourself.

Well.

It’s a big ‘sort of’, but still.

She feels for him, she really does, fully understanding why he’s not doing summersaults when they open their TARDIS’ door and find themselves stepping out into a dark apartment.

They know something is wrong long before they find him; the place is a mess, the air stale and reeking with an unpleasant amalgam of smells. Donna wishes she could say she’s surprised when they enter the bedroom and find the man currently overdosing on the bed, but unfortunately, she’s already deduced too much by then to be anything but.

For all of his obvious reluctance at being here, the Doctor doesn’t hesitate and gets fully involved, the two of them getting to work at once, quickly carrying him back to the TARDIS, the ship having brought the infirmary as close to the control room as possible.

They don’t talk much during the rush of this rescue, save for brisk exchanges about their various actions, which include completely pumping out the Human Doctor’s stomach and hooking him up to a couple of different fluid bags, all meant to clear up his system, while giving him some of the substances he’s lacking.

Less than half-an-hour has passed when things settle down enough for Donna to properly assess the Doctor’s state – the conscious one.

He’s beyond tense, not to mention livid.

“What kind of idiot would ingest this amount of alcohol and then mix it with sleeping pills?” he eventually asks, glowering at his counterpart.

Donna stares at him from across the infirmary bed. “Even you can’t possibly be that thick,” she says. When all she gets in response is the kind of glare she hasn’t seen on him in a while, she continues: “This was no accident.” She looks down at the man between them, her insides twisting uneasily at the sight of him. “Been going downhill for quite some time, from the looks of it. Not sure I want to know what’s triggered this.”

The Doctor is now the one giving her a look, both suspecting that what happened to him isn’t a ‘something’ but a ‘someone’.

They are quiet for a couple of long minutes, before the Doctor speaks again: “Maybe she left.”

Donna looks up at him. He doesn’t meet her eyes.

“Maybe she never…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence – typical of him. She doesn’t need to share some of his brain patterns to understand what he’s trying to say. There’s an odd look on his face, matching the odd tone he just spoke with.

How confusing it must be, to have wished for Rose to be happy with this other _him_, all the while resenting that human version of himself for getting what he could never have; something in him obviously hopes Rose never managed to settle down after they left.

Donna doesn’t share her Time Lord’s denial, all the evidence pointing towards Rose having settled with his counterpart well enough.

Aware that he needs to be proven as much, Donna moves, slowly grabbing the Human Doctor’s left hand and lifting it from the bed, so that the Doctor can see what she’s noticed a while ago, her nail gently tapping on the golden ring. “I think she stayed.”

The sight of the wedding band causes the Doctor’s scowl to deepen rather dramatically, aware that she’s just triggered some serious brooding.

“Get back out there and find out what happened,” he eventually tells her, or rather orders her, in the kind of tone she usually never allows him to use with her – or with anyone else, if she gets a say in it.

She lets it slide today, knowing better than to argue, feeling quite shaken by the whole situation herself.

She does go back out of the TARDIS to explore their flat, although her exploration does not tell her much more than what she’s already deduced. This is the home of someone who’s been neglecting himself and his living environment for some time.

It feels…lonely.

Woman’s clothes are prominent in the main closet of their bedroom, all of them obviously Rose’s, along with every other items that seem to belong to her, and yet, Donna senses her absence from the place.

She does _not_ need to be a genius to put these grim puzzle pieces together.

While she’s in the bedroom, she senses a shift in the energy around her; she quickly finds the growing TARDIS, discarded on the dresser, having taken the form of a wooden music box.

It looks…withered, the way a plant looks when it’s been overlooked and ignored for too long, the wood cracked in several places.

Donna gently grabs the small box, feeling the faint undercurrents that soon travel under her skin.

“You did good,” she tells the young TARDIS.

Unable not to, she opens the lid, and soft music begins to play. The melody is unfamiliar to her, but she has no doubt it holds a particular meaning to the people who used to grow it. She closes it, before going back inside the fully grown TARDIS, setting the box comfortably upon the console, letting it receive some much needed nurturing from its big sister.

Donna makes it back to the infirmary just in time to see the Doctor wiping what appears to be a trail of _blood_ from his nose.

“What the hell happened to you?”

He waves a dismissive hand, his frown deep and irritated. “What did you find?”

“Oh no you don’t,” she says with a glower. “You’re not pushing me out and ignoring my questions, Spaceman, you know how much I like it when you turn into an arse.” And then, seeing as much as sensing how disgruntled he is, she asks, more quietly: “What’s going on? Did he wake up for a second and decided to punch you in the face?”

On the bed, the Human Doctor looks exactly the way he did when she left the room – skinny, pale, and sickly.

The Time Lord grimaces. “Not…physically, no, but…pretty much, yes.” When she stares at him in confusion and growing frustration, he explains himself: “I tried opening up a telepathic link between us. He’s got some sturdy defences in place, and absolutely no desire whatsoever to have me poke in there.”

“You mean, he’s aware of what’s going on?” Donna asks.

The Doctor tilts his head this and that. “I doubt it. From what I felt before his mind pushed me out, he’s locked himself deep in there.” There is a pause. “I still want to know why.”

Donna purses her lips, trying not to look at him with too much _pity_ in her eyes – he hates that. “All I found was their TARDIS,” she admits. “Doesn’t mean we can’t draw our own conclusion, though,” she says these words quietly, kindly, even. “Doctor, I think Rose – ”

“We’re not speculating,” he cuts her off.

“Look at the state of him,” she replies with more vehemence. “Not to pour salt on a gushing wound, but think about the state you were in when – ”

“I said no _speculating_,” he reiterates, quite strongly, now. After a brief, heavy pause, he says: “I want you to give it a try."

“Give what a try?”

“I want you to get inside his head.”

“Okay, first of all, intrusive much?” she asks, and he matches her glare perfectly. “Second of all, what makes you think he’s going to let me in any more than he let you?”

“You made him,” he states coldly. “Just as much as he made the person that you are, now. Put crudely, you’re two sides of the same coin. His subconscious won’t see you as a threat.” When she simply carries on staring at him, he continues: “It’s not just about figuring out what happened. We need to assess what he’s done to himself beyond the chemical overdose. We can spend the next half-an-hour debating his lack of consent, but you and I both know you’ll end up doing it, because his life is at stake.”

Sometimes she really, truly dislikes his face.

“_Fine_,” she eventually mutters between clenched teeth, because he’s right, of course.

She’s not particularly eager to dive deep into the subconscious of the man she gave life to, in the aftermath of what looks like an attempt at putting an end to his misery, but the Doctor is right. Pumping his stomach and clearing up his system won’t do him any good if he never regains consciousness.

To give the Doctor credit, after he opens up a connection between her and the man on the bed, she does not struggle at all to get inside his mind, soon finding herself pulled _inward_.

Donna is confused at first, standing exactly where she stood moments ago, inside the infirmary. She quickly notices a few differences.

For one thing, everything around her lacks proper…_consistency_. Like she’s looking at a scene through a thin, undulating veil. That, and the fact that the other two people now in the room are not quite the people she left behind.

“I said _carefully_!” the Doctor exclaims – or rather whines, sitting at the table.

“You’re such a wuss,” Rose tells him, sitting across from him with one of his hands in hers. “Last of the Time Lord, defeated by a few prickles, who would’ve known?”

“Tenfold the amount of pain a regular plant from the caryophyllales order inflicts, Rose,” the Doctor protests, his voice rising, wincing when Rose pulls out another prickle from his fingers with some sort of tweezers, causing his glasses to slide further down his nose. “_Tenfold_. I believe I was quite clear about that figure.”

“Just like you were _quite clear_ about me needing to be careful not to touch the local plant life under any circumstances.”

“Do as I say, not as I – _ow_!” he whimpers.

Rose actually clicks her tongue in annoyance, giving him an unimpressed look. She squints at him, then, before reaching across the table and grabbing the specs from his face, casually putting them on her nose, leaning closer to his hand again.

“So they actually _do_ make things bigger,” she notes, a bit surprised. “Always thought you wore them just to look smart.”

“Well,” the Doctor tilts his head, before he winces again. “They do make me look smart.”

“You sure need that vote of confidence today, Cactus Boy.”

“Again, not a cactus.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, from the caryocoocoo order, you’ve said it a few times.”

“_Caryophyllales.”_

“I just said that.”

“You two are kind of cute,” Donna speaks, then.

Unsurprisingly, the pair carries on ignoring her, even though she’s standing _right there_ in the room with them. At this point, Donna has already figured out that she’s not an actual part of the scene playing in front of her. She’s witnessing a memory, that one obviously from a time before Rose got trapped in the other universe.

Just as she’s thinking this, the scene morphs, and she finds herself standing in a living room.

They’re not in the TARDIS anymore, and the Doctor present in the room with Rose is not the Doctor she’s familiar with, although she recognises him from the memories in her mind, the way she would recognise any of his former incarnations.

“I am not changing my mind, no point in you looking at me like that,” this Doctor in leather is telling Rose from where he sits on the couch, and he sounds much rougher than the man he will become.

Rose, who looks younger still, is lightly biting down on her lip, looking at him in a way Donna _knows_ will get her exactly what she wants.

“You humans have _no_ respect for species that outrank yours on so many levels according to the Shadow Proclamation,” the Doctor protests.

“C’mon,” Rose tells him with a sweet smile. “t’s just a meal. She made banana bread, too.”

The Doctor peers at Rose, just as Jack peeks his head out of the kitchen, his mouth full of what looks like a rather big piece of cake indeed. “s ‘eally ‘ood ‘oo,” he half-articulates, spitting crumbs all over the place.

“I said not yet!” Jackie is now shouting, pulling Jack back into the kitchen by the collar.

The scene doesn’t play through completely, everything already changing, and Donna watches as the Doctor _whizzes_ passed her on a speeding shopping trolley, also moving passed Rose, who seems both unimpressed and unbothered by the man’s antics, grabbing a few items from the shelves.

The Doctor whizzes back their way, forcing the trolley to a squeaky stop in front of Rose, who casually drops her items in there.

“It doesn’t work as well without you sitting in it,” he informs her, despondent. “Completely skews the mass and speed ratio.”

Donna observes this Doctor, with his scruffy face, messy hair and casual clothes.

He also looks healthy and happy.

“Yeah, well, we were told we would be banned from shopping here if we did that again,” Rose reminds him as she picks more items from the shelves. “We’re already lucky they’re not kicking us out right now, with you messing about all over the aisles.”

“Did I mention how _stuffy_ twenty-first century humans are?”

“Only twice today,” she says, patting his arm affectionately, before pushing herself up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “Give me a hand, yeah?” she whispers in his ear. “Then we can go home…” she suggests even more quietly, and Donna has never seen the Doctor look more…whipped, already leaning down to kiss her.

The scene changes quickly, bringing Donna somewhere _cold_.

She does not feel the cold, although she observes it. She watches the two figures standing a few metres away, Rose bundled up in a thick coat, while the Doctor wears nothing more than his usual attire – the leather jacket, again.

A wave, at least a hundred feet tall, stretches towards the sky, frozen in place and time.

While Rose cranks her neck and watches this colossal wall of solid water curving downwards high above their heads, the Doctor looks down at his young human companion, oblivious to the terrifying beauty towering over them.

The scenes begin to shift faster and faster, now, as if his mind had finally sensed the intrusion and was trying to protect his memories.

Donna briefly watches as the Doctor and Rose exchange vows and rings, along with a couple of tearful hugs.

She watches as Rose falls asleep on the Doctor’s shoulder, the two of them bundled up on the couch in the media room of the TARDIS.

She watches as all three incarnations of the Doctor run, in a rapid succession of memories, Rose’s hand clasped in theirs, as if trying to outrun the tide of time.

The rapid myriad of scenes suddenly comes to a stop.

The room she’s in is dark, and mostly quiet. There are a few…_peculiar_ noises she can hear just fine. It takes her a few seconds too long to realise where she is, and what she’s looking at, exactly.

There’s a bed there, with two very _naked_ people in it, clearly in the midst of some intense love making.

Donna slaps her hands over her eyes and twirls around at once, as her entire being shudders in protest and profound disgust.

“All right, fine, I’m leaving!” she shouts at his subconscious, feeling the connection between their minds break.

She blinks a few times at the brightness of the infirmary, finding herself a bit woozy as reality settles back in.

“What did you see?” The Doctor asks her at once.

Donna scowls, quite traumatised by the experience. “Your bum at an angle I never wanted to see, for starters,” she hears herself saying, still working on reconnecting fully with her surroundings.

When she finally looks at his face and sees his frown, she shakes her head. “Never you mind,” she sighs. “You were right. He’s trapped himself in there. He’s…looping. Made himself a nice little home movie, from all his happy times with Rose – including _your_ time with her, too, I suppose. He felt me peeping after a while, though, more or less kicked me out. I don’t think he’ll let me back in.”

The Doctor doesn’t say anything, simply looking down at his counterpart. Donna puts a hand on his arm.

“You and I both know who’s got the answers you don’t really want to hear,” she says softly. “We might as well take him there. Whatever happened…we can’t stay here indefinitely. You know they’ll take care of him.”

The Doctor eventually nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is not mandatory, but it is, as always, greatly appreciated ♥


	3. III.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "He can’t say he’s surprised when he opens the door and finds Jackie already standing on the porch, aware that she’s been drawn out there by the sound of the TARDIS.
> 
> A sound that used to mean her daughter was home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do realise it's only been two days since my last update, but what can I say? Spent most of my weekend on this, so why the hell not? Can you tell I'm eager to move on to the less depressing half of this story??
> 
> That being said, this chapter is a bit like tearing off a bandaid (or plaster). I realise it contains a few more painful things, but it will be worth it.
> 
> I think.

**III.**

The Doctor doesn’t initially understand why Donna doesn’t allow him to materialise the TARDIS directly inside the Tyler’s mansion. She has to actually spill it out for him, how it’d be just as intrusive as bursting through the front door, no matter their degree of familiarity with the occupants.

He usually tries to mind all those social etiquettes at least a _little_, but he’s got no patience for this nonsense today. Despite his refusal to listen to everything else Donna has been telling him, he does have a not-so-vague idea of what might have caused his human counterpart to break apart the way he did.

They materialise in the courtyard, in the end.

He can’t say he’s surprised when he opens the door and finds Jackie already standing on the porch, aware that she’s been drawn out there by the sound of the TARDIS.  


A sound that used to mean her daughter was home.

She doesn’t move from where she stands, arms crossed, staring at him with hard eyes. She’s in a better state than his counterpart, but even from a distance, he notices that she looks…older.

She looks like someone who’s experienced too much in a short period of time.

When a full minute goes by and she remains unmoving, Donna nudges his sides. “Let’s go,” she tells him, kindly enough.

His walk to Jackie Tyler is not an easy one, feeling the Earth’s gravity pulling at his bones as they go up the few steps to the porch, eventually coming to a stop in front of her, hands deep in his pockets.

“What’re you doing here?” she asks, and her voice is as sharp as her eyes. “Thought you were done with this universe.”

No hellos, or any sign that his presence here is welcome.

“We…” the Doctor tries; he of course doesn’t finish.

“We received a distress signal,” Donna explains, quietly. “About…the other Doctor. He’s inside the TARDIS right now. He’s not doing too well. We thought he might be able to stay with you, while he recovers?”

Jackie’s expression doesn’t change as she stares at Donna. “Took too many pills again, did he,” she states more than she asks, and there is a chilling resignation in her voice.

The Doctor gives a short nod, unable to maintain eye contact when she brings her gaze back to him.

“Just…bring your box inside. Main entrance will do. You can carry him to one of the downstairs guestrooms.” She’s already walking back inside at this point, her phone out, and the Doctor knows who she’s about to call home.

He and Donna do not talk as they move the TARDIS from the courtyard to the entrance hall, just as quiet when they follow Jackie to a bedroom at the back of the house, once again working together to carry the unconscious man.

“He’s done this before, then?” Donna eventually asks Jackie when she’s done tucking him in under the covers.

They’ve changed his clothes before coming here, grabbed a pair of pyjamas straight from the wardrobe, but they didn’t have time to give him a proper wash, and it shows.

Jackie shrugs, the gesture more tired than dismissive, her eyes unfocused, not looking at any of them. “’t is at least the third time in as many months. First time me or Pete isn’t there to help, though. I sup’ose it’s a good thing you found him.”

She says the words, but her tone tells another story.

“Would you tell us what happened?” Donna asks quietly, having picked up on the fact that the Doctor has gone back to being rather mute at the moment.

Jackie shakes her head, before setting herself into motion, walking back toward the entrance hall. “I’d rather wait for Pete to come back. Can’t do this alone.”

They follow her into the sitting room, and for a while, that’s all they do – sit apart from each other, no one talking, not even looking at one another, the silence only broken by the grandfather clock dutifully noting the passing of each second.

Sixteen minutes and fourteen seconds later – that’s nine-hundred-and-seventy-four ticks and tocks – Pete finally enters the room. He gives his wife a brief, tight hug, before going to Donna, then the Doctor, shaking both their hands, eventually sitting down next to Jackie.

“Jacks told me you brought him home. Thank you for that,” Pete says, and the Doctor _almost_ opens his mouth to say something.

He doesn’t, simply staring at the other man.

“I suppose you want to know what happened,” Pete says.

“If you don’t mind,” Donna says, carrying on with being the voice of their duo.

The silence is thick, more seconds ticking loudly between them all.

“There was an accident, during a mission.”

“It was no accident,” Jackie corrects him at once, her voice loud and tense.

“No, I suppose it wasn’t,” Pete says, his voice already thicker. “From everything we’ve gathered, it seemed to be a planned attack. Five…five agents were killed.”

Silence.

“Aren’t you gonna ask the question?”

The Doctor knows Jackie is talking to him. When he dares to look in her direction, she’s staring right at him.

“Rose was one of them,” the Doctor speaks at last, sounding more detached than he feels.

Neither of her parents denies it, which confirms it well enough.

“How long ago?” Donna asks quietly.

“Ninety-seven days,” Jackie states tersely.

Three months.

“How?” the Doctor asks. His voice doesn’t sound like his own.

“Does it matter?” Jackie almost snaps. “t’s not like you’re gonna jump into your flying box and go back in time to get her out of there, got that much figured out years ago didn’t I, when you two just ‘popped out’ for a short trip, and came back twelve months later instead of twelve days. She explained it all to me, all of your timeline non-sense.”

This silence manages to be worse than the previous ones.

“It was some sort of…gas,” Pete eventually says. “We call it Exoterm IV. It kills within minutes, although it does it without any pain which is…a small comfort. The problem is that it is quite reactive with the gases in our atmosphere. It doesn’t react strongly for the first fifteen minutes or so while it binds with the molecules in the air of the rooms it’s dispersed in. But if you open doors or windows and let more air in…”

“It causes an explosive reaction that can spread up to a three hundred metres radius,” Donna finishes for him. “Tavrik gas,” she says to the Doctor, who doesn’t even nod, having made that connection himself.

“We learnt that the hard way a couple years back,” Pete resumes. “We knew better this time. Within four hours, the bonds between the molecules just…break apart on their own, and the air becomes safe again, but it means…”

“You couldn’t enter the building she was in for four hours,” the Doctor is the one to finish that sentence.

He sees the man shaking his head without really seeing him, his mind elsewhere, getting a clearer picture of how things went down. His counterpart hadn’t been part of the mission, obviously, but he would have been informed that something had gone wrong. He would have been kept away from the scene.

Forcibly, he has no doubt about that.

“The Doctor, he just…” Pete eventually attempts, but he lets that sentence hang, too.

“He went absolutely mad,” Jackie says. When her husband winces, she glowers at him. “He bloody did, and you know it! He wanted to go out there and find her murderers, make sure they got what they deserved, and if it’d been up to me I wouldn’t have stopped him.”

“Who did it?” the Doctor asks, thinking something rather similar in that moment.

“A small group of aliens we’ve identified as ‘Gadovs’, behaving as a terrorist cell. Most of them left the planet within the first twenty-four hours, but we tracked down the few that were…too slow. Two were killed during a raid, but we managed to keep one alive. We almost managed to make the Doctor see reason for a while, but then…”

Once again, he cannot carry on, everything in his tone and body language making it clear something _worse_ had happened.

Donna tries meeting the Doctor’s eyes, wondering what could possibly be worse than everything they’ve been told so far, but the Time Lord is trapped in his own head, his eyes distant and empty, causing him to miss the way Jackie shakes her head at her husband, almost imperceptibly.

Donna doesn’t.

“Anyway,” Pete continues. “I suppose he did go a bit mad, then. Stole one of the prototypes we were working on, and tried leaving the planet with it to track the rest of the Gadovs down. That ship wasn’t anywhere ready to fly, though. Came straight back down and crashed, although thankfully, there was no casualty. He did get into quite a bit of trouble for it, but I did my best to keep him out of prison.”

From the sad, resigned note in his voice, he seems to be wondering why he bothered, considering what the Human Doctor has done with himself in the subsequent weeks.

Another painful stretch of silence goes by.

“I told them it wasn’t healthy,” Jackie eventually speaks again, more quietly than she has so far, her sorrow more evident in her voice. “Told them it was nuts, the way they were with each other,” she continues. “Co-dependent, that’s what they were, and I told them that, too. Barely able to be away from each other for more than five minutes. Got even worse when they got…_it_ going.”

“It?” Donna cannot help but ask.

“Don’t really know how to explain it.”

“Do you mean when they became…lovers?” Donna offers.

This actually causes Jackie to look at Donna in outrage. “How thick d’you think I am, exactly?” she protests in a high, offended voice, and Donna recoils in her seat. “ ‘s not what I mean at all. They just started to…I dunno.”

She taps-taps the side of her head, then, as if to say ‘crazy’, but Donna doubts this is what she’s trying to say either.

“They were bond mates.”

All eyes turn on the Doctor, who spoke the words.

He actually looks at Jackie when he carries on: “You mean they developed a telepathic connection. They could communicate without words.”

“Worse than my four year old, the two of them,” she states. “With their inside jokes and silent conversations. Constantly laughing like a couple of nutters in the middle of dinner. Drove me barmy.”

She says this as if she wants to be annoyed at the memory of it, but her voice is thick and sorrowful.

“That’s what drove _him_ mad, in the end,” she continues more quietly. “’t was that more than just the grief of losing her. Couldn’t cope with that ‘bond’ being gone. Kept saying he could hear her in his head, calling his name. Only when he slept at first, but then he said he could hear her when he was awake, too. Said it was just…echoing, all the time.”

Donna looks at the Doctor, trying to have her own silent conversation with him, but he’s stood up while Jackie spoke, now standing in front of a window, his back to them.

“The telepathic rupture would have made him mentally unstable for some time,” he does speak after a while.

He seems to be saying this to himself more than to them, although he’s turned somewhat, Donna now able to see his face, which is paler than usual, his eyes vacant.

“It’s a terrible feeling when it happens,” he continues. “Really throws your entire mind off, but I’ve never heard of it causing that kind of hallucinations. That might have simply been a side effect from all the alcohol he was consuming, which was a dreadful choice on his part. I suppose I can see why he found it appealing, especially with a weaker human body, as he would be more susceptible to its numbing effects. I’m surprised you let him drink as much as he did, though, it was bound to – ”

_SLAP_

It happens so fast, Jackie springing off the couch and beelining for the Doctor to smack his face, that Donna isn’t quite sure it actually happened at all.

But Jackie is definitely standing in front of the Time Lord, now, who is clutching at the side of his face with an expression of genuine shock, pain, and a little bit of fear, too, as he looks down at the fuming woman.

“Don’t you _dare_,” Jackie nearly snarls. “What d’you think happened, exactly? D’you think the day after she died, we just waved him off and told him it’d been nice knowing him, but that he had to go on on his own, now? Want me to tell you how many times I’ve forced my way into their home and ended up cleaning vomit off his face, only to have him physically push me out the moment he became able to stand on his own again?"

“Jackie…” Pete tries, having joined her, attempting to put a calming hand on his wife’s arm, but she shakes it off.

“No!” she shouts, her fury running as deep as her sorrow, her blazing eyes still on the Doctor as tears begin to streak down her face. “Have you _met_ you, Doctor? You are the most infuriating, stubborn git I ever had the misfortune to know, every version of you! So you better believe that once _he_ set his mind to something, there was no changing it, even if this time, his mind was set on drinking himself to death, making sure to shut us out every step of the way, over, and over, and over again! So no, we didn’t just _let him drink_, Doctor. We tried, and we failed. We failed her, too. ‘cause our Rose might be gone, he’s still her husband, he’s still one of us. He’s _family_, you understand? And if you say anything like this to me again I’ll – ”

But she cannot finish, her voice getting choked by a raising sob, a hand now up to her face.

Just as quickly as she’d jumped on the Doctor, Jackie makes her way out of the room.

Donna observes the two men standing in front of her, Pete looking defeated and worn out, while the Doctor has hung his head in what almost resembles shame, one of his cheeks flaming red.

Knowing there is nothing neither of them can say, she turns around and follows Jackie out.

It leads her back to the guestroom where they’ve brought the Human Doctor, who remains as unconscious as he’s been for the last two hours. The door to the ensuite bathroom is open, and Donna hears the sound of running water.

Aware that Jackie needs some space to pull herself together, Donna doesn’t join her, sitting on the edge of the bed instead, taking in the man lying in it. The clearing fluids they gave him while on the TARDIS appear to have had some effect, at least, his skin looking somewhat healthier, some colours back on his face.

She looks up when Jackie comes out of the bathroom, carrying a bowl of steaming water and a couple of cloths. She sets everything down on the nightstand, before sitting on the bed opposite Donna, who watches her as she sets to do a task she’s obviously done many times before.

“We did try,” Jackie eventually speaks, her voice subdued, her gaze fixed on the Doctor’s face, which she’s now cleaning with a gentle yet assured hand.

“I know,” Donna says softly.

“He just…” she can’t finish her sentence. “I got a boy of my own, you see. ‘t was hard enough, trying to explain to him what’d happened to his sister while dealing with my own stuff. I really did try, but it became too hard. I just couldn’t anymore.”

“I know,” Donna repeats, kindly. “I live with one of them. ‘Stubborn git’ is the perfect descriptor for the Doctor.” When Jackie lets out a shaky breath, followed by a brief nod of her head, Donna continues: “He knows that, too, the other Doctor. But he’s in pain right now. And when he’s in pain, he becomes particularly self-absorbed and arsy.”

“That does sound like our man,” Jackie says quietly, carrying on with her motherly cleaning. “He made her happy, though, he really did. And she made him happy, too. ‘t was just cruel, for her to go like that, little more than a year after he got here. But…she got to have him for a while. I know she was loved. I try to take comfort in that.”

She distractedly wipes at her face, still not meeting Donna’s eyes.

“Is there…something else, though?” Donna asks, her voice low and sympathetic. “Something you’re not telling me? Back out there, I got the feeling your husband was leaving some things out.”

Jackie’s next exhale is her shakiest, yet, obviously trying to get a grip over her emotions, her eyes tightly closed.

“Do you have children?” Jackie eventually asks.

A fleeting vision crosses Donna’s mind, and her insides clench, remembering frantically turning over bed covers, trying to find her boy, and her girl, but all she found was emptiness.

“No,” Donna answers in a breath, pushing the vision away.

And then she waits, patient and empathetic.

“She was pregnant.”

The following silence presses down heavily on their shoulders and hearts.

“Only a few weeks along,” Jackie resumes, now slowly using her wet cloth on the Doctor’s hair. “Five, six weeks at the most. They didn’t know. Or, maybe she did. Even this early, your body…anyway. The Doctor, he didn’t know. Came as a real shock when her post-mortem came through. That’s when he really lost it.”

She’s stopped her ministrations, resting a hand on his hairy cheek. “Went absolutely mad, he did,” she recalls, her voice barely above a whisper. “’was already drinking, by then, when he got it into his head to take that ship and fly out. I still don’t know how he didn’t die in that crash. Came out of it barely even bruised, even if we all knew he’d wanted to burn with it.” She shakes her head. “You fool,” she whispers. “What would Rose say if she saw the state of you, now?”

At the mention of Rose’s name, the Doctor’s face actually constricts slightly, and a faint whimper escapes his throat.

Both women stare down at him, their breaths similarly held tight in their lungs as they wait for…more.

But more doesn’t come.

…

After both Jackie and Donna leave, a heavy silence settles in the room.

The Doctor is back to staring out of the window, hands deep in his pockets, not seeing the courtyard at all. Lost in his thoughts, he’s trying to get a handle on the storm raging inside his chest, experiencing an unsurprising combination of anger and denial.

He’s fighting a familiar urge, too; the urge to step inside his TARDIS and send her back in time, so that he can get Rose out of harm’s way.

How often did he fight a similar urge, after Canary Wharf? That need to turn back time and keep Rose from ever falling toward the Void? Or more recently, his urge to go back to that deserted street and disable the Dalek before it got to shoot at his running self.

But Jackie was right about him. He could never act on those urges. One of the many curses of a Time Lord.

To have the ability to travel back and forth in time, yet being forbidden to use it for personal gain, not even to save the woman he loves.

“I think there’s something you need to see.”

The Doctor blinks, slowly turning around to face Pete again.

“I didn’t share this information with him – the other you. Not after what happened, how he tried leaving the planet,” he explains. “I know it’s important, but whatever it means, it’s beyond our reach, not with the technology we have at hand. I just didn’t see the point of…” his voice trails off. “I figured it was kinder, not to tell him something else he couldn’t do anything about.”

“What is it?” the Doctor asks, his eyes on the piece of paper Pete has extracted from inside his suit.

“Are you familiar with the Gadovs?”

The Doctor nods. “They’re mercenaries, mostly. Hired grunts.”

Pete nods, too. “The last one of them we held captive? He talked…eventually. As it turned out, they were not the brain of that operation. _They _were.”

He hands over the paper, and the Doctor takes it, putting on his specs, his eyes quickly scanning it. It’s a transcript of the Torchwood interrogation, during which the last of the Gadovs had revealed the name of the species that had been in charge indeed, along with a full set of coordinates to their main base.

Inside his chest, both his hearts have started to pound again, so focused on the connections that are forming in his brain that he forgets to regulate his breathing, which soon becomes loud and shallow.

Without a word, the Doctor dashes for his TARDIS.

Donna joins him a mere three minutes later, finding him busy at the console. “What’s up with you? Pete said you just ran back in there.”

Without a word, the Doctor grabs for the piece of paper he’s discarded on the console and hands it over to Donna, who reads it within seconds.

“The Hyrovingians? I thought they were extinct. Didn’t their planet burn during the Crescent War, with all their colonies dying out within the next century?”

“Obviously not in this universe,” the Doctor says, sounding as crazed as he feels, filled to the brim with manic energy. “They somehow survived the war here, or maybe that war never happened in the first place. And you and I both know why the Shadow Proclamation was so keen on turning a blind eye and letting them be wiped out.”

Donna blinks at him. “Cloning,” she states. “Unethical use of their cloning technology.”

“I don’t think Human me is just hearing voices,” the Doctor says, working speedily on setting their next travelling coordinates. “I mean, it’s possible, even probable, but too many things don’t add up in this story, from Rose’s death to him being driven mad by ‘remnants’ of their telepathic connection. Losing that kind of link hurts like hell, I can attest to that, but from everything we’ve seen and been told, it goes way beyond a broken link.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Donna asks.

He wiggles his eyebrows at her.

“Even with advanced cloning technology, once the necessary DNA sample is obtained, it would still take a couple of hours to grow a perfect, identical clone,” he says, his voice deeper. “And how do you keep everyone away for a couple of hours, so that no one interrupts a growing sequence followed by a ‘body swap’ operation?”

“Tavrik gas,” Donna states.

“Tavrik gas,” the Doctor confirms, pressing his tongue to the back of his teeth as he slaps at a lever with a tad too much force – for dramatic effect. “Time we pay them a visit, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes!” Donna agrees with a crooked grin, slapping at another lever with the same energy, and between them, the Time rotor begins to wheeze, as if in agreement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm quiiiiiite excited to get working on the next part, not gonna lie. I''ll try my best to get it done this weekend. 
> 
> Feedback sure helps a lot, your enthusiasm so far has been wonderful and so motivating ♥


	4. IV.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "When Rose leaves the flat that ill-fated morning, the Doctor is sound asleep.
> 
> She’ll think about this a lot, in the upcoming weeks; how she didn’t wake him up before leaving their place."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was DEAD SET on getting this chapter written and readable this weekend. Of course, it turned out to be way longer than I anticipated, which made things slightly trickier, but oh well. Do forgive any typo you'll probably notice in there. I tried.

**IV.**

For all of her flaws and occasional missteps, the TARDIS usually does her best to ensure her inhabitants won’t get caught as soon as they step out – which is why they often land in glorified closets.

Today is no different.

The first thing they notice when they leave the TARDIS is the rather loud, ongoing siren piercing the air.

“It’ll just be our luck, landing onto a ship that’s about to blow up,” Donna states as they sneak out of their ‘closet’, checking the adjacent corridor.

It’s deserted, although there are unmistakable noises, a mixture of loud voices and hurried footsteps. The sounds are all off, though, as if they were speaking in a foreign language. Which, they obviously are, but they should be able to _understand_ that language.

Proper translation isn’t necessary to understand the nature of the things they’re shouting.

“I don’t think it’s about to blow up,” the Doctor muses. “I think we might have landed right in the middle of a prison break.”

“Come off it,” Donna says with a matching, doubtful scowl. “I mean, let’s be serious for a moment. As much as I like the idea of us showing up _right_ when the person we came here to rescue is in the middle of staging an escape, we both know how improbable that is. If my brain can do that maths, so can yours.”

What they have no way of knowing at the time is that, out of the ninety-seven days Rose Tyler and her team have spent captive on this ship, they’ve already staged eighteen escape attempts.

This is their nineteenth.

“Can you feel that?” the Doctor asks as they shrink back behind the wall to hide from a passing group of aliens.

“If you mean an increasing need to pee, yes I do. I keep forgetting adrenaline gives me a weak bladder.”

“Donna,” the Doctor almost snaps at her, his mood unsurprisingly volatile. “I think it’s her.”

“You think it’s her…what?”

The Doctor simply taps against the side of his head, taking another peek around the corner. “They’ve got some serious telepathic shielding in place, that’s why the translation matrix is malfunctioning. It feels all off, but someone’s definitely trying to make contact. Let’s go!”

The two of them, as smart as they are, are not exactly known for being the best at stealth, relying heavily on his sonic to disable anything that can be disabled, all the while sprinting a bit clumsily from one concealed area to the next, usually bickering in loud whispers about which direction they should be going in as they do.

Despite their overall lack of discretion, they do make some progress within the ship, managing to remain hidden every time someone dashes passed their area.

“I don’t know _why_ I keep on following you when you clearly have no idea where we’re going,” Donna is pointing out again.

“Yes I do!” the Doctor defends himself, more irritated by the second. “This is a typical Hyrovingian vessel, which means their main control room should be close to the front of the ship.”

“Well, Mister _Oblivious_, you’re forgetting all these Lavenian features that are clearly part of the core architecture, which means the control rooms would actually be in the lower levels, closer to the hull.”

“What Lavenian features?” the Doctor protests, barely even whispering anymore. “Those little arch things near the airlocks? Come oooon, those are obviously remnants from the Deroxincis era.” A pause. “Which, come to think of it, might mean the control room would be higher up, near the back.”

“The control room’s actually dead centre on this ship, ‘bout two levels down,” says a familiar voice somewhere behind them, causing them both to jump in surprise. “Wouldn’t recommend it, though. Can’t get in without the proper DNA clearance.”

They turn in unison, spotting a very much alive Rose Tyler standing half-concealed in the nearest doorway, two other human heads peering suspiciously at them.

“Isn’t that your _husband_?” one of them whispers to Rose.

///

_When Rose leaves the flat that ill-fated morning, the Doctor is sound asleep._

_She’ll think about this a lot, in the upcoming weeks; how she didn’t wake him up before leaving their place. _

_How she didn’t even snuggle up to him in bed, with her over the covers while he remained underneath, burrowing her face in the crook of his neck, into that place she loves so much, pressing a succession of loud kisses to his skin. That’s something she’d done most mornings before going to work, lately, ever since he started his night shift rotation and their opposite schedules caused their time together to become so limited. _

_But that morning, he comes home literal minutes before her alarm clock goes off, unintentionally stirring her from sleep when he joins her in bed, asleep himself before he can as much as spoon her, a glaring sign of how tired he is. When the time comes for her to leave and she stands in the bedroom’s doorway, watching him sleep, she feels the familiar urge to join him and spoon _him_, to pepper his skin with kisses. _

_She remains where she is instead, because doing all that usually wakes him enough for him to groan in fake disapproval, until he blindly grabs at a pillow he then uses to ‘slap’ her head with a couple of times, not moving much after that, his arm and the pillow only pressing her more firmly to him._

_“I love you,” she always whispers in his ear before nibbling at his lobe, eventually extracting herself from his loose grasp._

_Rose doesn’t do any of this, that morning, choosing to let him sleep instead, unaware this is the last of her husband she’ll see in months._

_…_

_During the first few hours that follow her abduction, still somewhat woozy from whatever chemicals she’s inhaled in that building, Rose lets her captors handle her like a rag doll. _

_She’s vaguely aware that they’re bathing her, no less than three tall and _purplish_ individuals sharing the_ _task, their six fingered hands surprisingly gentle as they wash her. In her foggy, groggy state, unable to either speak or move on her own, she begins to think they’re prepping her to be either eaten or dissected._

_Neither happens._

_She wakes up in bed some time later instead, hours at least, dressed in nothing but a long, white robe that looks like a toga, the fabric soft and fluid against her skin. That’s when the words _ritual sacrifice_ enter her thought process and refuse to leave._

_That’s also when she starts reaching out for the Doctor._

_Something is very wrong with their connection; she feels it the moment she’s aware enough to take in her surroundings and assess the situation. It feels…muffled and strained, unable to hear him at all. _

_Now she’s still quite new at this _telepathy_ thing, but he’s been a good teacher, these past few months, and she’s been a better student than she ever was during her school years. She understands enough to know this strain in their bond might be caused by a variety of things – one of which being that she’s clearly not on Earth anymore. _

_This is confirmed when she’s explored her room long enough to find a button that, when pushed, reveals a large porthole. With her heart thumping at the base of her throat, she presses a hand to the cool glass as she observes the stars, recognising the looping shape of a distant galaxy, wondering if it is the Milky Way._

_This is her first trip to outer space in over a year, and he’s not by her side to experience it with her._

_…_

_They don’t sacrifice her that day. _

_Instead, they carry on dotting on her, giving her _another_ bath – at which point she begins to wonder if maybe humans are particularly smelly to them. She doesn’t even have it in herself to feel prude while these three tall, purple strangers wash every inch of her again, too baffled by the whole thing to be able to make sense of it, using that time to observe her ‘abductors’ instead._

_She’s seen quite a few aliens in her traveling days with the Doctor, but never any from this species. They look humanoid enough, if not for the purple skin, extra fingers and that third eye in the middle of their forehead, all of them wearing similar togas to the one she was wearing before they stripped her naked, although they don’t look anywhere as _ceremonial_ as hers._

_After her bath, they give her food. She’s so hungry by then that she doesn’t even hesitate, having eaten enough alien meals in her life not to be put off by the weird textures and colours._

_When they take her to what clearly is a medical facility later on, Rose panics a little, her thoughts back on _dissection_. She doesn’t want to go without a fight, but they really are much taller than her, outnumbering her five to one at this point._

_They don’t dissect her either._

_She probably should have realised what they were up to when they put some kind of fancy equipment above her lower abdomen, but she remains anxious and oblivious until a 3D projection of what clearly is a _foetus_ appears right in front of her eyes, floating in mid-air, its rapid heartbeats echoing loudly across the room._

_Rose stares at it, absolutely dumbfounded, as all around the room, every alien present raises their hands to the skies, almost in prayers, all of them murmuring the same word, another sound she cannot understand. _

_She’s too awestruck and distraught to pay much attention to this odd religious display._

_This is her first time seeing their baby, and he’s not by her side to see it with her._

_“Please take me home.”_

_She will come to say these words often in the next three months._

_They never do._

_…_

_Communication is an issue._

_From everything she’s seen so far, they seem to be technologically advanced enough to have developed some way to translate other languages, but if they have, they don’t bother using it with her._

_Once again, Rose is a quick learner, on top of being highly perceptive, and having good instincts. Within her first two days here, she realises that those aliens, although imposing looking, appear to be rather docile. They also seem set on treating her like some kind of deity, which confuses her to no end._

_She makes her first escape attempt on her third day._

_She doesn’t make it far, only a couple of corridors down from the room she managed to run from, but she learns a lot, that day: they will not physically restrain her, nor attack her, not even _locking_ her in a room, which swiftly leads to escape attempts number two and three, during which she sees enough to realise the rest of her teammates are on this ship._

_After her third failed attempt and their refusal to let her be with her teammates, she begins starving herself._

_She’s not particularly keen on damaging her body, considering the young life currently growing in it, but their lack of proper communication means she has to become a tad dramatic in order to make any kind of point. Her health is primordial to them, she understood that much after _hours_, hence her refusal to put any more food in her mouth._

_It only takes two skipped meals for them to take her to another room, in which she finds the rest of her team, all well-cared for – although again, nowhere as thoroughly as her._

_Five brains being better than one, they start coming up with escape plans that become more and more intricate with every passing week. _

_Two months into their captivity, they haven’t made it out of the ship yet, but their various wanderings have given them a good knowledge of the place and its layout. Their captors _do_ get frustrated with them – they don’t need a translator to understand that, but whenever they try separating their team, all Rose has to do is start fasting again for them to give in and put them right back together._

_That, or she simply turns on the tears._

_Works like a charm every time._

_…_

_She never stops her attempts at reconnecting with the Doctor._

_She’s long ago come to the conclusion that there must be some kind of device preventing her from reaching out to him the way he taught her how. _

“Distance is meaningless,”_ he once told her, after they’d successfully experimented with sparking up their link while she was attending a Torchwood conference on the other side of the country. _“A telepathic connection doesn’t actually require particles to travel through space, a bit like light. All it really needs is some intense focus and a great deal of stubbornness.”

_Focus and stubbornness. _

_Trapped in her own corner of the universe, the pain from missing him rubbing her raw a little more each day, Rose becomes extremely focused and masterfully stubborn. _

_She’s started picturing a physical shield around her, keeping her from reaching him, and she’s set her mind on slowly breaking it down, tiny piece by tiny piece, until she gets her message through._

_She needs to tell him that she’s all right; that she’s as safe as she can hope to be, and that she’s working on getting back to him._

I’m all right, Doctor…

I’m all right…

Doctor…

Doctor…

_Again and again, she sends her message across the stars._

_…_

_Rose has never been this healthy in her life, her body slowly shifting and coming up with new curves as it adjusts to the small being she carries._

_The most paranoid part of her wants to believe they might still be planning on feasting on her baby once she gives birth, but realistically, she highly doubts they would harm her Little Bean, as she’s come to think of him. _

_For one thing, she’s not planning on giving birth here. She’s also become convinced her captors genuinely care for her and her baby._

_She _does_ know what _Stockholm syndrome_ is; she’s experiencing a bit of it herself, there’s no doubt about that._

_It’s hard not to become emotionally compromised when the majority of the ship’s inhabitants treat her like she’s the most important being in the universe, calling her _Gaea_, while they nothing short of worship the very ground she walks on, for reasons still unknown to her._

_When Rose isn’t plotting her next escape attempt with her friends, she’s become rather fond of the various activities they make her do, from regular bathing, to massages and meditation._

_No matter how well they care for her, there is nothing they can do to stop her from waking up in the middle of her sleep cycles almost every night, now, drenched in sweat, a sob stuck in her throat. _

_There is nothing fake about those tears she cries, curled up alone in bed, plagued with suffocating visions of her husband slowly wasting away back on Earth, while she’s being pampered day in and day out._

_“Please take me home,” she asks them, every single day._

_They might not understand her, they understand enough to hear the plea in her voice, to see it all over her face. In response to her anguished request, they whisper quiet words that make no sense to her either, pressing soft hands to her curving stomach._

_She understands enough to know that they won’t._

_…_

_The tears she cries that night aren’t caused by the visions in her head, but by movements within._

_She’s been feeling flutters for a few weeks, now, as well as an indescribable presence in her head, not yet able to communicate properly with her child, but her Little Bean has nestled himself as securely within her mind as he’s settled within her womb._

Settled_ is not the word she would use tonight, stirred from deep sleep by movements that have never been this strong before. All she can do is lie there as the sensation repeats itself, again and again, clutching the pillow to her face, letting it absorb her tears and muffle the sound of her sorrow._

_This is her first time feeling their baby boy kicking, and he’s not by her side to feel it with her._

_Their next attempt will _have_ to be their last._

///

“Isn’t that your husband?” one of the men whispers to Rose.

Rose’s expression as she stares at the Doctor is…odd, although not as odd at it’s been in the past on a few occasions – including that one time he regenerated in front of her.

She doesn’t need to speak for him to know _she_ knows he’s not ‘her husband’.

And indeed, she’s already shaking her head, looking away from the Doctor to check the other side of the corridor. “More like…his twin brother,” she says in a tense, quiet voice. “Okay, we should be able to catch up with Matt and Lydia in the H section if we start moving now. The TARDIS _is_ here, isn’t she?” Rose is talking to them again, her eyes on Donna.

“Only a couple minutes’ walk that way,” Donna indicates the corridor they just came from with a tilt of her head.

“Figured that much, yeah,” Rose breathes out. “We could hear you bickering all the way down there. C’mon, we’ve got to meet up with the rest of our group.”

They do follow them, the Doctor unable to take his eyes off Rose, for various (obvious) reasons, one of them being the mere fact that she’s _there_, in front of him, alive and in a much better shape than he expected her to be in, after three months of captivity.

She’s also quite a sight to behold.

All three of them are draped in togas, but Rose’s is nothing like the men’s. The fabric she’s wearing is ivory white, silky and embroidered with intricate patterns, several golden bracelets on her arms. Her hair, which is a tad shorter than it was during their last few weeks together all these years ago, looks thicker and wavier than he’s ever seen it; it looks like it’s been treated daily, and with great care.

The sight of her walking between her human companions make her look almost…regal, like she could be royalty on this alien ship. That feeling is only reinforced by the fact that, while they are trying to be discreet in the way they move, they do not look like people who are afraid of getting caught.

They quickly meet up with the rest of their team, the other man and woman wearing similar attires, although once again, nothing as extravagant looking as Rose’s.

“Isn’t that your husband?” Lydia is keen to ask Rose when she spots the Doctor, who doesn’t miss the unconcealed _delight_ in the other woman’s voice as she says those words, genuinely pleased for her friend.

The Doctor scowls at her, already done with being repeatedly called _Rose’s husband_ when he really is not Rose’s husband.

Rose doesn’t answer this time, barely shaking her head, that tense look back on her face, still unable to meet the Doctor’s eyes as she asks: “Can you take us back to the TARDIS?”

They almost make it there.

“_Gaea_!”

They turn to face a group of _six_ Hyrovingians coming their way.

When one of them speaks, the Doctor might not be able to understand the words, there’s something close to supplication in the alien’s voice, none of them making any move to try recapturing their escapees.

There is also an obvious lack of weapon to be seen.

In the prime universe, for all their unethical doings when it came to cloning, the Hyrovingians had been a highly spiritual species that did not believe in violence – which explains why they died out as quickly as they did. From the looks of things, they appear to be just as inoffensive in this universe.

Well, except maybe for the ‘we came up with an evil, elaborate plan to kidnap a few humans’ bit.

“I’m sorry,” Rose speaks then, to the Hyrovingian who’s just spoken to her, and she sounds it, too.

When a couple of them start moving forward, the Doctor brandishes his sonic screwdriver.

Technically speaking, there’s nothing his device can do – except maybe shut down all the lights in the corridor and cause a distraction, but the Hyrovingians don’t know that, looking at the blue tip with some concern – especially when the Doctor presses on it just hard enough to cause the lights overheard to flicker in dramatic warning.

“_You will let these humans go_,” the Doctor speaks in a rusty Ptsevolinian, a language all species of category five and above used to speak at the time of the Crescent War.

“_Gaea must stay_,” one of them replies. “_Gaea holds the Light_. _The Light must be protected_.”

The Doctor scowls at them. “What even are they babbling about?” he asks Donna, the only other person in their group able to understand the ongoing ‘conversation’.

She rolls her eyes at him. “_What is the Light?”_ Donna asks them.

One of them puts their hands on their lower abdomen. “_The Light,_” they say. “_It was foretold. The Light will come, born of the Lord of Time and the Wolf. The Light is precious and must be protected.”_

Now the Doctor’s Ptsevolinian might be rusty, he understands _that_ well enough, turning to look at Rose, who is still avoiding meeting his eyes, quite aware that she’s the main topic of discussion.

“You’re with child,” he tells her more than he asks, genuinely shocked by this new piece of information.

Rose doesn’t move, nor speak, but the way her eyes fill up with tears while two of her human friends put soothing hands on her arms say quite enough.

His shock already morphing into numbness, the Doctor turns back to the group of Hyrovingians. “_You have no right to keep these humans prisoners. You must let them go, or I shall send our warriors to your ship and you shall all be destroyed!_”

“_But the Light_ – ” one begins, quickly interrupted by the Doctor.

“_The Light will be protected on Earth, where it belongs,_” he tells them, quite threateningly. “_You caused great pain by taking her and the other humans from their homes. Make amends now by setting them free._”

“_We only meant to protect the_ – ”

“Yeah yeah,” the Doctor dismisses them, officially bored and irritated. “We got it. But she’s coming with us, now.”

No one tries stopping them, even when their group starts moving again.

When they make it to the TARDIS, they let everybody in, ignoring the humans’ gasps and their ‘_It’s bigger on the inside!’_ exclamations, both he and Donna quickly setting up the sequence that will send them into the Time Vortex before the Hyrovingians get a chance to change their mind.

The moment the ship dematerialises and escapes the telepathic shield that surrounded it, the intermittent nudges from Rose’s mind become a _push_ so powerful that the Doctor finds himself clinging to the edges of the console to stay upright, having to focus all of his energy onto keeping her from _crashing_ in there – something that would be detrimental to them both.

He senses a hand on his arm, keeping his eyes closed as he concentrates on keeping Rose out. “What’s wrong?” Donna asks, alarmed.

He gives a short shake of his head, his teeth clenched. “Can you…” he almost growls. “Please get everyone but Rose out of the room.”

Donna doesn’t argue, something that only happens when she _knows_ something serious is happening, promptly following his request.

“What’s going on?”

The question comes from Rose, this time. He reopens his eyes, watching as she sits down upon the jump seat.

It is…surreal, seeing Rose looking the way she does, here in his console room.

She’s almost…ethereal.

The incessant push upon his mind is most definitely real, though. From the confused look on her face, he doubts she’s even aware she’s doing it.

His counterpart had obviously taught her enough for her to become proficient at telepathic communication, but she’s just spent three months with her mind forcibly blocked off, while she undoubtedly tried her best to reach out, judging by all those ‘echoes’ his counterpart has been hearing.

“You’re giving off some _very_ potent telepathic waves, right now,” the Doctor explains to Rose, his voice strained from the mental effort. “Your mind is instinctively trying to latch onto the one it’s most familiar with. And since we’re stuck in the Vortex and I’m a close second to what it’s used to…”

“Oh,” she says softly, understanding setting in. “Sorry, ‘m not…”

“It’s all right,” he says – lies, really. “But I can’t – ” he swallows hard, closing his eyes.

It would be easy, _so_ easy, to give in and just let her in, to let her rush through him and settle in there, just as easy as it would be for him to reciprocate and settle in her.

But he can’t.

She’s not his anymore.

“Would you let me…tune it down?” he asks, reopening his eyes to look back at her.

She seems confused for a moment as she takes in his words, eventually nodding a little.

“Yeah, sure,” she says softly.

The Doctor steps closer to her, too close, something in him protesting and yearning at this excruciating proximity as he slowly brings his fingers up to her temples.

Rose opens up at the smallest of touch from his mind, intimately familiar with this process, and his insides clench again at the thought of how effortless and blissful it would be, to properly meld with her.

He doesn’t, using their connection to gather her back inside her own head instead, like loose tendrils gently being pulled back, making it so that only a conscious decision from her will open up her mind again.

When he’s done, the relief is instantaneous, although leaving what little of her mind he allowed himself to penetrate feels like losing a piece of his hearts again.

He doesn’t move back immediately, his hands still on her skin; her fingers have instinctively come to grab at his forearms as he worked, her face so close to his.

She smells so sweet, and warm.

Rose is the one to break contact, in the end, dropping her hands from his arms while tilting her head slightly, a wordless request for him to let go. He does so at once, as if jolted back to reality, taking a step away from her, looking down at the console without really seeing it.

A heavy kind of silence begins to grow between them.

She’s the one to break it.

“Where is he?”

The Doctor almost winces at the quiet distress in her voice. He has no doubt she’s been wanting to ask him this question the moment she realised he wasn’t the Doctor she hoped to see, back on that ship.

He turns his head to look at her, still sitting on the jump seat in that ivory gown.

Now that he’s not distracted by the aching strain on his mind, he notices how pale and shaky she is, aware that this physiological response isn’t caused by cold, the room noticeably warmer than it once was, thanks to Donna.

There is an agonising look slowly taking over her face and her whole body language.

“Do you…” he tries, before swallowing hard. “Are you aware of how long it’s been, since you were taken?”

She nods. “About…three months?”

The Doctor nods as well. “Ninety-seven days, according to your mother.”

Rose’s breathing hitches, perceptive enough to understand the main implication in this statement.

“Doctor,” she breathes out. “Where’s my husband?”

She _must_ have known using this title would hurt.

She uses it anyway, her best way to convey her distress, one of her hands now resting on her stomach, pressing upon what has to be a growing bump under the silky fabric.

“He’s…” the Doctor tries, forcing himself to look away from her midsection, his eyes on the floor, now, clearing up his throat to get rid of the catch in it. “Donna and I came back to this universe because the TARDIS you’re growing sent us a distress signal. We…found him and brought him to your parents.”

“Doctor,” she says his name almost in warning, this time.

“You weren’t just kidnapped, Rose,” he tells her at last, looking at her as he does. “The Hyrovingians hired mercenaries to stage an attack on you and your team, replacing your bodies with clones. To everyone on Earth, you’ve been dead for three months.”

She takes it all in, her breathing loud and shallow, clearly shocked by his words and yet…it seems like she almost expected it. A couple of tears roll down her cheeks as her face constricts, wet trails she swiftly wipes off with a trembling hand, a pointless gesture, truly, new tears soon streaming down her pale skin.

She looks up, eventually, meeting his eyes as she whispers four words he never thought he would hear from Rose:

“Please take me home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting there, my lovelies. I hope you're still with me. I'm gonna start making up for being evil, now ;-)
> 
> As always, your feedback does wonders for both my happiness level and my eagerness to get up early on the weekend to write things ♥


	5. V.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s craving his touch and the feel of him, almost to the point of pain, now, yet everything rational in her keeps reminding her he is not the man she’s aching for.
> 
> The man she’s aching for is still on Earth, thinking her dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to have this done this weekend but I got sliiiightly distracted by extreme fluffiness. 
> 
> This is sliiiigtly less fluffy than my last oneshot. I've got no objectivity when I'm writing a story, but I think this might pull on some heartstrings, fair warning for those of you who get emotional. Also, there is an 'anxiety attack' trigger warning on this chapter.
> 
> Do excuse the typos. It gets worse when I'm particularly French (which I am this week).

**V.**

The Doctor is halfway done entering the new sequence that will take them back to Earth when Rose stops him.

“Wait.”

That single word is thick with tears, even as she fights to get her emotions under control. She feels more vulnerable than she has in weeks; shaky, weak, and drained, as if all the focused energy that had kept her going on that ship is suddenly gone.

The unexpected _hollow_ in her mind is not helping.

Whatever the Doctor has done to her when he ‘muted’ the telepathic waves she’d been sending, it has made her more aware of _his_ absence than at any point these past three months. It’s as if their link was completely severed, and the loss of it _throbs_.

When the Doctor turns from the console and meets her gaze, Rose has to use every ounce of resolve she’s got left not to break down completely. Being near him is as confusing as being around his more human self used to be, back when they were first left behind in this universe.

She’s craving his touch and the feel of him, almost to the point of pain, now, yet everything rational in her keeps reminding her he is not the man she’s aching for.

The man she’s aching for is still on Earth, thinking her dead.

“I just…” She looks down at herself as a few more traitorous tears escape her eyes, indicating her outfit with a weak sweep of her hand. “I can’t go home looking like this…” she whispers through her tears.

The thought of going home wearing this embroidered robe only worsens her anxiety, these clothes only a small proof of how well she was cared for while they all grieved for her.

“All your belongings should still be in your room,” the Doctor tells her quietly, and she dares a glance his way – pointlessly, it turns out, as he’s not looking at her anymore. “You can change in there, if you want.”

Her heart aches at both his words and that unbearable _stillness_ between them. While his uncertainty about what she might find in her old room could be seen as indifference, Rose suspects it has more to do with self-preservation on his part, having obviously avoided the place for some time. She cannot possibly go there herself, not in her current state, anything but ready to face what used to be her life on the TARDIS with him.

Not to mention the fact that she’s at least four months pregnant, and definitely showing; she doubts she’d fit in most of the clothes she wore when she was _nineteen_.

“Why don’t you pop into my room and look through my clothes instead?”

Donna’s voice startles them both, turning their heads to find her casually leaning against one of the coral columns, near the main corridor.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” she says, before pausing. “You know what, the hell with it, I totally meant to eavesdrop,” she admits with a shameless shrug of her shoulders, before looking directly at Rose. “Most of my things are probably too big for you anyway, but I think they’ll fit you better than whatever you used to wear, back then.”

Rose wishes she had it in herself to thank her for being so perceptive; all she can do is swallow passed the lump in her throat, feeling shakier than she did a minute ago. “Where…where are the others?”

“Exploring,” Donna says. “I took them to the wardrobe to change, but everybody kind of scattered from there. I left Lydia and James in the media room, Matt already got lost in the gardens, and I believe Ethan is getting acquainted with our kitchen. I told them the truth, about what happened to you all on Earth. They need some time to process it all.”

Rose cannot even nod, the lump in her throat having become painful, now, her heart thumping in her chest. Even the flutters she feels within herself aren’t enough to comfort her. She finds it increasingly harder to breathe, as if the room was shrinking around her, despite the vast physical space surrounding her.

“I’m just gonna…” she somehow manages to breathe out, glancing at the Doctor again. He hasn’t moved at all, stiff and immobile in front of the console.

He nods once, not even trying to look at her.

Rose gets up on legs that feel simultaneously cottony and made of lead, instinctively pressing a hand to her bulging stomach through soft fabric, in case her body gives up on her and she collapses to the ground.

She doesn’t, somehow managing to walk to Donna, who looks at her with obvious concern, putting a gentle hand on her back as she guides her towards her room.

The moment they enter the smaller, cosy space, the last of Rose’s strength leaves her, as if her body had been waiting to be somewhere more private – and away from _him_ – before it allowed itself to break completely.

The main problem with this is that she cannot breathe.

The air simply refuses to go down her lungs, despite the fact that she’s gulping for it, now, her heart pounding against her ribs and inside her head and _god_ what about her baby, what if she deprives him of oxygen, too?

Somehow she finds herself sitting at the edge of the mattress, with Donna’s help, undoubtedly, the older woman crouched in front of her, a hand on her arm, the other cupping her cheek, and it takes Rose a long moment to realise Donna is talking to her.

“It’s all right, Rose, you’re all right, just breathe, that’s it, just breathe in, and then breathe out, it’s okay, it’s all gonna be okay, you’re safe, just breathe.”

With Donna’s comforting touch and calm instructions, Rose manages to get her anxiety under control, enough for the suffocating sensation to lessen, gradually more aware of where she is and what is happening.

“It’s all right, you’re all right,” Donna is repeating softly, both her hands gently rubbing her arms, now, but Rose shakes her head.

“’t’s not all right,” she whispers, aware that she’s crying, probably has been through this whole episode, but there’s nothing she can do about it. “I’ve just spent three months being treated like a queen on that ship, while everyone I love thinks I’m _dead_.”

Donna’s hands stop moving, gently tightening her grip on her arms in emphasis. “This is not a competition about who got it worst, love,” Donna tells her softly. “You were abducted, and taken from your home. You were kept captive for weeks, all the while having to deal with being pregnant, all on your own. The fact that those aliens treated you well doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic for you. Don’t do this to yourself. All they’re going to feel is relief and gratitude at having you back, especially when they learn you and your baby were kept safe.”

Rose _knows_ she’s right, but her rational mind has decided to shut down for the time being. All she can think about now is what it must have been like, for those left behind.

Worse than the thought of her parents and little brother, it’s the thought of her husband that truly breaks her.

“What happened to him?” she manages to ask through her tears, because not knowing is worse than anything else.

Donna doesn’t answer immediately, debating whether or not telling her the truth is a good idea, given her current state, barely even out of what looked like a proper anxiety attack. Her hands are still on her arms, and that small touch is enough to feel the tremors running under her skin.

She deserves to know what happened, no matter what.

“From what your parents told us, and from everything we could infer today, it seems that the Hyrovingians were aware of your telepathic abilities, and they made sure to block it off so you couldn’t communicate with anyone. Some of it still managed to bleed through whatever shield they had in place, though, which resulted in…echoes. The Doctor, _your_ Doctor, he was able to hear those echoes. He just thought he was going mad, especially since he’d started…self-medicating after your ‘death’. When we found him, he’d mixed a lot of alcohol with too many sleeping pills. It wasn’t an accident.”

The hand Rose has brought up to her face at some point during Donna’s monologue is not enough to muffle the sorrowful sound that escapes her. Donna is moving, then, coming to sit on the bed next to her, entrapping her in a warm, motherly embrace, rocking her and shushing her.

“I’m so sorry,” Donna eventually speaks again. “I know this is painful to hear, but you need to know what to expect when we get you there. The Doctor and I, we tried helping him as much as we could, cleaned up his system so that there wouldn’t be any lasting physical damage, but…”

She hesitates again.

“Just tell me,” Rose almost begs against her shoulder.

“He’s done something to himself. He’s sort of…trapped inside his own subconscious. More specifically, he’s trapped inside his memories. His memories of you.”

Donna feels for the young woman, who seems rather unable to stop crying against her. After a few more minutes of trying to soothe her without much success, she pushes herself off slightly to look at her while she offers her next piece of advice.

“Listen,” she tells her softly. “I know you’re already blaming yourself for everything that happened, and that me telling you you shouldn’t is not going to make a bloody difference to you. What I can tell you, though, is that a hot shower and a small nap is probably something your body needs right now.”

Rose actually _scowls_ at her, trying to wipe at her face, her breathing jerky and loud. “’m not gonna nap _now_. They still think I’m dead, just like everyone else’s family. If I wasn’t such a mess, we’d all be home already.”

“Sweetheart, we’re in the Time Vortex,” Donna reminds her. “It doesn’t matter whether we spend thirty minutes here or thirty hours, we’ll still make sure we arrive back only minutes after we left.”

When Rose still looks unconvinced and guilt-ridden, Donna decides to be quite blunt.

“The truth is, as much as he would deny it loudly and with way too many words, that husband of yours is going to need you when you get there. And because you love him and people in love do stupid things like this, you’re going to give him all you’ve got. Which is not much, right now, and you know it. So, _please_, you need to take a breath, and stop for a moment. You need to take care of yourself before you can take care of anyone else, all right? If not for me, or for him, do it for your baby.”

Rose has actually calmed down almost completely during Donna’s new speech, taking in her words. After another long silence, she nods.

“I guess I could use a shower and a nap…” she whispers.

“Yes, you could,” Donna says, releasing her completely and standing back up, going to open her wardrobe. “Again, most of that stuff will be too big, but it should be comfortable enough. Is there anything you’d like me to get from your old room while you shower?”

Rose hesitates for a moment, before giving a small nod. “There is, actually.”

…

The Doctor has gone through a variety of moods since the day he made the decision to leave Rose behind in this parallel world with another version of himself, many of which have been closely related to _morose_.

He’s never felt quite as dreadful as he does now.

There is something excruciating in having her back, his Rose, on his TARDIS, yet not having her back at all. Being around each other is suffocating, too many conflicting emotions coming from both side. They’ve managed not to be alone with each other again since that initial moment when he’d dealt with her mental outpouring.

When Donna reappears and tells him Rose is taking a nap, he doesn’t ask question, nor make comments, well aware despite his denial that she’s very much pregnant and freshly rescued. That’s about the same time Rose’s humans companions begin to reappear from various corners of his ship, and they start talking logistic about their return to Earth.

Well, Donna does the talking. He’s not exactly in a chatty mood, today.

They eventually decide they should drop Rose off first, before taking the others to Torchwood, maybe even with Pete, if he’s willing to leave his daughter’s side – although no one is under the illusion that Rose is going to spend much time with her _parents_ once she gets there.

When she finally reappears, she does look better than she did earlier; now back to wearing regular, casual clothes, she somehow manages to look even lovelier, the Doctor’s stomach dipping at the sight of her in such a familiar hoodie.

Of course the first words he speaks in over an hour would be to her.

“How are you feeling?” he hears himself asking before he consciously makes the decision to begin another exchange with her.

She glances at him more than anything else, her hands deep in the front pocket of her hoodie, her shoulders instinctively hunched forward in discomfort, even as she shrugs faintly.

“A bit more like myself,” she replies, quietly. “I’m…’m ready to go home, now. Sorry,” she whispers to the other humans.

The Doctor ignores their ensuing platitudes, barely even looking when they start exchanging _hugs_, his mind set on getting the TARDIS moving to the right time and location – as well as on _not_ looking at Rose for a couple minutes.

That trip does not take long.

By the time they’ve rematerialized back where they’d been only a few hours ago, Rose is noticeably shaky again as she stands in front of the TARDIS’ doors.

“Do you want us to go out first?” Donna offers quietly; they’d agreed that everybody but she and the Doctor would go out with her.

But Rose shakes her head, already moving forward and opening the door, not hesitating anymore as she steps out.

Something almost keeps the Doctor from following her outside the way Donna is. He follows them, unable not to, just in time to witness the scene as both Jackie and Pete emerge from a corridor into the entrance hall, their gazes transfixed on their daughter. The sound Jackie lets out then is _wounded_, somewhere between a rasp of disbelief and a sob of relief.

Rose moves before any of them do, nearly running into her mother’s arms the way the Doctor has seen her do before after particularly harsh trips. This doesn’t quite compare, though.

The way the two women cling to one another is too raw for him to bear, soon looking away with a lump in his throat, as affected by the many sounds of their reunion, from their tears to their unintelligible spoken exchange. It doesn’t get easier when Pete swiftly joins in, both parents embracing their lost child as if she was much younger, and she lets them.

Minutes pass…quite a few of them, according to his time sense.

The Doctor goes from being barely able to watch this reunion to being unable to look away, watching as Pete gives his girls a moment to themselves, dabbing at his face.

Jackie cups her daughter face in her hands, wiping her cheeks, even as new trails immediately replace them.

“I need to see him,” Rose manages to say to her mother, her voice thick with tears.

Jackie nods, her mouth opening to say something, but the Doctor speaks before she can.

“I’ll take you,” he tells Rose.

All eyes turn on him, feeling the various degrees of unease his offer sparked.

He senses Donna’s stare most of all, although he’s careful not to look at her, well aware of how she would pinch her lips and shake her head; even without a telepathic bond of their own, he _knows_ she’s already calling him an idiot.

Which he is. He’s well aware of that, too.

He proceeds anyway, moving away from his TARDIS, passed the three Tylers, entering the corridor that will lead him to the room in which his counterpart…sleeps. He doesn’t need to check to know Rose is following him, sensing her, so close behind him.

When he opens the door, he doesn't look at the other man, his eyes fixed on Rose, who’s stopped by his side. Her face constricts in anguish as she takes in the state of him; her tears, which had briefly relented while they walked through the house, begin to fall in earnest again.

She's moving passed him and into the room, then, climbing onto the bed to kneel by his side, so close to him that her knees dig into his shoulder, soon grabbing his nearest hand in both of hers, holding on to it as if to confirm he’s real.

As the Doctor watches her next moves, how she brings that hand up to her face and presses it closely to her wet skin, her eyes closing at the sensation, he knows he’s intruding into something private, almost intimate…that if anything else, he should look away.

But he can't.

He _won’t_.

Because this, this prying look into what could have been, is all he's got.

_This _is why he needed to be the one here, to witness this wordless yet irrefutable intimacy, to get a glimpse of what his sacrifice was for.

Seconds turn into minutes, and still Rose doesn't move, anchored so wholly and quietly into the feel of him, until the Doctor is bursting to the brim with aching restlessness, with the need to move, or speak, or maybe even scream.

“He shouldn't have any lasting physical damage,” he finds himself telling her, eventually, his voice back to sounding like it belongs to someone else. “He’ll still need to regain the weight he's lost, but the filtering fluids we gave him should have taken care of his…addiction.”

Despite his best efforts, there is an unmistakable condescending note in the way he says that last word.

Rose hears it, too.

She reopens her eyes at last, gazing down at the unconscious man for another long moment, before slowly lowering their hands back down onto the bed. She doesn't release his, even as she turns her head to look at the Doctor.

“Don't do that,” she tells him softly.

“Don’t do…what?”

(He _knows_ what)

“Just...don't,” she says with a small shake of her head, closing her eyes again.

He tries. Not to do it. At least a little.

He fails.

“He should have known better,” he hears himself saying, ignoring the warning bells howling in his head, as well as every memory of how recklessly he’s behaved himself _every time_ he lost her. “He's much too smart to have allowed himself to become this selfish and careless. If he’d been sober and his mind had been clearer, he probably would have realised a long time ago that those mental echoes he kept hearing was you trying to reach out.”

He hates himself particularly viciously, today.

“No.”

Although whispered, that one word is unequivocal, Rose staring at him with blazing eyes. For a moment, he wonders if he's going to get his second slap of the day.

Not that he would blame her any more than he blamed her mother.

“You don't get to do this,” she tells him in that same incensed whisper. “You don't get to come back here and play the wounded, vindictive _ex_, picking on my husband when he’s already down. ‘m just not having it.”

Once again, the Doctor doesn't _mean_ to make the face he feels himself making. He cannot help it, unfortunately, finding himself scowling not-so-faintly in disapproval, rather displeased with her claim that he doesn’t get to do this, or with the simple fact that she’s called _him_ her husband again.

Rose takes a sharp intake of breath in response, turning her face away as her entire body tenses and quakes, sensing the quiet anger rolling out of her in waves.

“You..._left_ me,” she speaks at last to the opposite wall. Her low, whispering tone is not enough to conceal the pain in it.

She finally turns her head to look at him again.

“You ran off when I wasn't looking,” she reminds him in another pained whisper. “You _left_ me here.”

The tears that are sliding down her cheeks are somehow worse than any other tears he’s seen her cry today, coming from a place of raw betrayal.

“So now what? You’re _bitter_ because we did what you left us here to do? Are you really that petty that you can’t even sympathise with a man in pain?”

The Doctor has looked away, unable to bear the hurt and disappointment constricting her every trait; hearing it in her voice is hard enough.

“He doesn’t deserve this kind of hatred from you,” she states quietly. “And neither do you.”

He looks back at her. “I don’t…hate him,” he says.

She makes a face, none of them convinced by his weak statement.

“We saved the universe at a cost, and the cost is him,” she begins quoting. “He’s too dangerous to be left on his own.” Her voice is increasing in volume. “Full of blood and anger and revenge. _He’s too smart to be this selfish and careless_.”

“Rose, I – ”

But she won’t have it.

“D’you even realise how…_messed up_ that was? Leaving me here to have that ‘perfect human life’ with him, right after telling me he was dangerous and genocidal?”

“That's not what I was-"

“Save it,” she cuts him off again, even more harshly than before. “Whatever you’re trying to say, he said it all for you a long time ago.”

As the memory of what _he_ did say obviously comes back to her, her anger swiftly turns into sorrow, her next inhale loud and wobbly. She closes her eyes, shaking her head a little.

“He’s nothing like the man you said he was, even if he’ll never completely believe it,” she whispers, and her face constricts in agony again as she reopens her eyes to look down at the man she loves, sinking a hand into his hair in a gentle caress, her other hand bringing his back to her face. “He’s…_kind_, and compassionate, and sensitive, and…he didn’t deserve to be in this much pain.”

She doesn’t say anything else for a while, mostly because she can’t, too overwhelmed by the thought of her husband grieving her, and the Doctor watches as she tries taking comfort in the mere feel of him, once again feeling like he’s intruding on something private.

He does look away, this time.

“I’m sorry,” he speaks at last after a long silence, and his voice is the most honest and raw it’s been since she found him on that ship. “I didn’t mean to be this…petty,” he says, using her own words. “The truth is, I’m no better than him. I never react well to losing you.”

When he dares looking back at her, she’s watching him intently.

“I shouldn’t have said those things, back on the beach,” he continues. “I knew exactly how similar we were, and I hated him for it. As you probably know by now, being me involves a great deal of self-loathing.”

The shadow of a sad smile crosses her face.

“I didn’t want to accept it, you know,” she admits in a thick whisper. “I wanted to stay mad at the two of you, for forcing me to make that choice. But…he _is_ you,” she says. “There was just no denying it. From the exhausting gob to the self-loathing, to having the most brilliant of minds. He’s just...softer around the edges, is all.”

Another pause.

“He's human,” the Doctor concludes, daring to use the slightest hint of disdain as he says this.

Rose lets out an odd noise, then, like a chocked-up laughter, looking back down at this human Doctor as she presses a loving kiss into the palm of his hand.

“Only the worst bits,” she says quietly, and from her tone and the sudden softness in her eyes, he suspects this to be some kind of inside joke between them.

She takes another long, calming inhale, before looking back at the Doctor, already sounding more _Agent Tyler_ like when she asks: “How do we wake him up, then?”

He keeps himself from grimacing. “We don’t,” he admits. “We can’t.”

Seeing the alarmed look on her face, he quickly explains himself:

“_We _cannot wake him up. It has to be a conscious decision from him, which is a tad tricky, since his consciousness is currently trapped in a loop inside his own mind. I tried getting in there but he was…uhm, reluctant to let me in. Donna was somewhat more successful, he let her in long enough for her to figure out what was going on, but he forced her out, too.”

They look at each other, and the Doctor knows what she’s going to say long before she says it.

“I’ll do it,” Rose says. “I’ll go find him.”

Of course, she would.

He's yet to find a universe in which she wouldn't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ll be honest with you all, ‘Person A goes into Person B’s mind to rescue them from themselves’ is one of my all time favourite, underrated OTP tropes, one I haven’t had the opportunity to write in YEARS either, so I am vibrating in anticipation :’D
> 
> The next chapter will be one hundred and forty six percent Tentoo x Rose heavy, you can trust me on that.
> 
> Your feedback means so much to me; don’t be strangers *smooches*


	6. VI.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Can’t believe you’re making me do all the work again,” she whispers to him instead, her fingers slowly running through his messy beard, her thumb caressing the corner of his mouth. “I guess Mum was right. ‘m giving you some really bad habits.”
> 
> He, of course, doesn’t answer.
> 
> “Don’t make this too hard for me, yeah?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your support and your patience; Real Life is kicking my butt a little bit, but I've finally managed to complete this chapter.
> 
> Slight feel warning, for my fellow emotional people. Also, slight increase in rating for some ~things happening somewhere in there.

**VI.**

If her intensive training taught her anything, it is that one cannot simply go blindly into an unknown situation – just like her traveling with the Doctor taught her that sometimes, there is nothing quite like going blindly into an unknown situation.

Rose cannot afford to be careless, today. One wrong choice, one wrong move, and he might shut her out so completely she won’t get another chance at reaching him.

Not knowing how long she’s going to spend in her husband’s mind, she chooses to spend some time with her parents first; the opportunity presents itself while the Doctor and Donna take the others to Torchwood. They don’t ask her many questions – not yet. Her pregnancy is not obvious enough for them to have noticed the changes, concealed as she is in one of her favourite loose hoodies. Her mother seems more intent on feeding her a lot more food than Rose feels like eating than on asking questions.

The elephant in the room – her Doctor’s comatose state and what he did to himself to get there – is not mentioned at all. Both her parents look marked by what they just went through, thinking her dead, which is hard enough for her to accept without bringing up her husband’s not-so-slow dive into alcoholism and his subsequent attempt at putting an end to his misery.

The TARDIS soon rematerializes in their entrance hall, the Doctor by himself now, Donna having apparently decided to stay behind with the rest of Rose’s team while they waited for their family.

The Time Lord doesn’t make eye contact with Rose as they walk back to the guestroom.

“From everything I’ve gathered so far, you should be able to establish the link on your own,” he tells her once they’re in the room. “I recommend you go slow. His state is such that trying to fully reconnect your minds might cause him to shut down completely.”

Rose merely nods; she’d had a good teacher, and the Prime Doctor knows it.

“If you need assistance…” He doesn’t finish that sentence, the two of them aware that Rose is likely to succeed on her own, and what it means for all parties involved. “Good luck,” he eventually mutters, before stepping out.

From this moment on, Rose’s focus is solely on her husband.

She joins him under the covers, automatically snuggling up to him, as close as she can, one leg slipping between his, while she cups his scruffy cheek in her hand. He’s never looked this…ill, not even during those first few hours in Norway when he’d been adjusting to his metacrisis. His skin is pale, dark shadows itched deep under his closed eyes, and she’s become intimately familiar enough with his body and the way it feels against hers to know he’s lost too much weight. Her insides ache at the thought that his state is actually _better_ than it was, helped by whatever the Doctor and Donna gave him.

She fights the urge to whisper two words in his ear, ‘_Help me’_, part of her convinced it would work just as it once did, all these years ago. She doesn’t; more than his prompt awakening, it’s the aftermath she remembers, how interrupting his coma only made his condition worse.

She can’t afford to take that risk.

“Can’t believe you’re making me do all the work again,” she whispers to him instead, her fingers slowly running through his messy beard, her thumb caressing the corner of his mouth. “I guess Mum was right. ‘m giving you some really bad habits.”

He, of course, doesn’t answer.

“Don’t make this too hard for me, yeah?”

She presses a kiss to his temple, before using her hold on him to turn his head, so that she can rest her forehead against his. Sparking their link open always worked best when he was the one instigating it, but it didn’t mean she couldn’t do it. She closes her eyes, and begins to breathe deep, and slow, opening up her mind gradually the way he taught her to.

Slipping into his mind is a bit like falling asleep; she cannot quite pinpoint the moment she goes from being aware of his body against hers, to being pulled _inward_.

She finds herself inside the TARDIS.

It’s not the TARDIS she was in only a couple hours ago, though. Nothing much has changed, but there’s definitely a different vibe to it. She instinctively takes a look at herself, and _she_’s a lot more different than his ship.

Her hair is much longer, straighter, too, and the outfit she’s wearing screams ‘mid-2000s’. More importantly, when she presses a hand to her stomach, it is as flat as it used to be when she was nineteen. She’s not worried, sensing the soft warmth of her baby in a corner of her mind, aware that if she focused hard enough, she would still be able to feel his movements.

For the time being, she focuses on her surroundings, noting the odd…_consistency_ of it all; it's like nothing is locked into place, where a small suggestion would be enough to cause everything to change.

She becomes aware of the muffled voice coming from under the console at the same moment she notices the legs sticking out from there as well. _These_ are not the legs she’s gotten well-acquainted with, and that voice…that’s a voice she hasn’t heard in a very long time.

“You know, I don’t really see the point of having a companion if that companion just starts napping every time she sits down.”

His tone is wonderfully acerbic, and a wave of old affection swells in her chest. “Not napping,” she counters automatically. “And you’re exaggerating again. It only happened the one time, _after_ we’d spent four hours running away from those weird orange looking Teletubbies.”

“You calling highly intelligent races of aliens _Teletubbies_ is why we end up running for our lives, most days.”

Another glaring exaggeration, but Rose doesn’t pick up on it, too busy watching as the legs move, becoming a torso, shoulders, and finally a head. “And I mean it, you know. It’s no use to me, having you here, if you’re not gonna listen when I talk to you.”

“Sorry,” she breathes out, nothing short of drinking in his face – the face she’d first come to love him with.

He sits up, soon springing up to his feet. “What is up with you?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s just…you’re beautiful.”

His frown turns into a scowl, peering at her. “Did you hit your head?”

“No.”

“Ate something from the kitchen that was clearly labelled ‘DEADLY TO HUMANS DO NOT CONSUME?”

She lets out a breathless laughter, sliding off the jump seat to walk closer to him, lifting a hand to his face; despite the fact that she _knows_ this is happening inside her head – or his, really, she swears his skin is cooler under her fingertips.

“I’m fine, Doctor,” she tells him softly, and genuinely, too, while he stands frozen in front of her, shocked by her touch. “I just…forgot, how beautiful you were, even back then.”

He squints his eyes again. “Poisonous gas, maybe?”

She shakes her head slowly, still cupping his face. “I’m here to help you. You’ve got to wake up.”

There is stillness for a moment as he stares at her. And then, his face breaks into one of his trademark grins. “Nope!” he exclaims, before extracting himself from her hold.

“Doctor – ” she tries stopping him, but he’s already moved away.

_Away_ away, as it turns out, the scene having completely changed without her even noticing the transition.

All she knows is that she’s flat on _running_.

“Come on come on come ooooon,” he’s shouting. “Now’s not the time to start dragging your feet!”

The Doctor holding her hand as they dash through a forest of trees that are more _purple and blue_ than green and brown, is taller, thinner, and bursting with energy.

Rose does more than just drag her feet.

She comes to an abrupt stop, and the Doctor being heavier than her, the shock caused by her sudden lack of _running_ combined with his momentum completely throws off their balance. He’s got no other choice but to stop running, too, his hand releasing hers to grab firmly at her waist instead as they stumble.

“While I usually appreciate your thrill-seeking attitude and your boldness in the face of lethal danger, I feel like you didn’t quite take me seriously when I said we would become appetizers if they caught up to us.” He frowns deep as these words rush out of him. “Is it that weak ankle of yours again? I really ought to take you to the healing fountains of Flobunash, because this is starting to become a – ”

“I’m fine, Doctor,” she repeats. “My ankle’s fine, and nothing’s chasing us.”

She’s making sure of that, their minds having melded enough to be able to influence their surroundings.

“_Nothing_?” He’s properly scowling, now. “Didn’t you see the teeth?”

“Oh, I saw the teeth,” she says, shrugging. “’t’s all a bit hazy, but I’m pretty sure they started coming after us because you thought it would be _intriguing_ to see what would happen if you told a bunch of native teenagers about that one sacred fertility ritua – ”

“Shhhhhhh!” He’s slapped his whole hand over her mouth. “The trees have ears, too. Ow!”

He jerks his hand away at the feel of her teeth, which barely _nibbled_ on his fingers, causing her to roll her (mind’s) eyes.

“There’s no trees,” she tells him. “Look.”

He does, and indeed, there is not a single tree left around them. They’re not in a forest anymore, but in a deserted street at night, in what looks like London…if London was devoid of any inhabitant except for them.

“What?”

His voice is high and beautiful.

He looks down at her, flabbergasted. “_What_?”

Rose shrugs. “I’m hijacking your mind.”

“Hijacking my…” His scowl deepens. “Now that’s just _rude_,” he tells her, offended. “And so typical of you, too, Rose Tyler, going around hijacking other people’s mind, with no regards for their right to do whatever they want in their own head.”

“Not just everyone’s mind,” she tells him softly, bringing a hand to his face the way she had in his previous memory, his cool skin as smooth and hairless as it was then, except for his sideburns, “Just yours.”

A pang of sadness goes through her at the thought of this Doctor he used to be, that same Doctor who can’t ever have her.

The moment this thought blossoms in her mind, this Doctor’s breathing hitches, already standing still in front of her, as taken aback by her familiarity as his previous incarnation had been.

“This…is not supposed to happen,” he tells her, his voice hoarse. “You’re a memory.”

She shakes her head a little; this statement alone proves that he _knows_ something odd is going on. “I’m not a memory,” she says softly. “I think you already know that, too.”

Deciding to be bold indeed, she uses her grip to pull him down, even as she pushes herself up on her toes, pressing their lips together. He stiffens even more against her, before getting a hold of her upper arms to pull her away, enough for their lips to part, and he stares at her in utter shock.

“That is _not_....what are you...we do not do_ that_!” he eventually manages to splutter.

Rose curls her fingers in his hair, lifting herself up again to catch his lower lip between her teeth for a quick nip, before letting her mouth trail down his chin. “We sure do,” she whispers against his skin. “We do it quite well, too.”

As she lets her lips trace a path that is intimately familiar to them both, his grip on her arms changes, pulling her closer instead of pushing her away; under her lips, his skin begins to change, stubble suddenly appearing, as if old memories were merging with new ones.

“I need you to wake up,” she whispers in his ear, and everything in her _squeezes_ in pain as he tenses against her.

It takes her a moment to realise the pain isn’t hers but _his_; lost in his mind, she has no other choice but to feel it as her own, just as he felt some of hers a minute ago.

“Come back to me,” she pleads.

He’s already wriggling out of her loose grip, looking at her with crazed eyes. “I am not doing that,” he states firmly.

“Doctor, listen to me,” she tells him, more urgently. “I’ll be right there, with you. I’m not de- ”

“No!” he shouts, clutching at his hair as his pain flares, his face constricting…

…until it’s not.

Rose blinks, back inside the TARDIS.

She’s in the library, lying on her stomach – still miraculously flat and baby free – with a Time Lord lying in a similar position across from her, a board game between them. Hairless chin in his hand, feet dangling behind him, he’s looking at the selection of letters in front of him, shifting his lower jaw from side to side.

“I suggest we revise that made up rule of yours about only being allowed to use Earth English,” he says with a pondering pout. “I can fit _xzyghdet_ snuggly between _garment_ and _toots_, which would create three additional words and earn me a nifty total of fifty-seven points.”

Rose does remember living through this, too. Her own memory of these seemingly random instances wouldn’t have been nearly as detailed in her head, though. When she runs her fingers through the carpet beneath her, she finds it to be as fluffy and soft as she remembers it being.

“I take your silence as agreement,” he states rather cheekily, reaching out to put his tiles on the board.

“’m just a bit confused,” Rose admits. “Of all the things we’ve seen and done together, especially this past year, you choose to hide in a memory of us playing _Scrabble_.”

“It’s a nice memory,” he says, making sure not to look at her. “Now hush and play.”

Rose sighs, looking at her own selection of letters. She would still be able to place ‘_deficiency’_ on the board as she once did, but she's not here to play Scrabble. She focuses on the tiles instead, until they begin to change into the letters she wants. She picks them up and puts them on the board, one by one.

** _WAKE UP_ **

“Now that’s cheating,” he protests. “You can’t have two words.”

“Doctor,” she says with a hint of frustration. “Look at me.”

He does, meeting her eyes.

“You know this isn’t real,” she tells him softly.

“It’s real enough to me,” he replies, thickly.

“How do you explain what’s happening, then?”

He gives a faint shrug, straightening up in a proper sitting position. “You’re a figment of my imagination, a trick from my subconscious to try and get me to wake up against my will.”

Rose sits up, too. “I thought your subconscious was trying to protect you.”

He lets out an odd noise, like a scoff. “I let you die, Rose,” he tells her flatly. “My subconscious and I are not on best terms at the moment.”

The pain that goes through her at these words is both his, and hers. When she moves closer to him, there is no more boardgame on the floor. She brings her hands up to cup his face again, his cheeks already back to being stubbled, the way he tends to keep them in their everyday life. His whole body language has changed, too, going from something almost carefree to something much heavier.

“’m not here to trick you,” she says quietly. “I’m here to take you home.”

He shakes his head. “I am not…” he swallows hard, briefly closing his eyes with a wobbly exhale. “I am not going back out there,” he says, weakly. “I’m staying here, with you.”

“I _am_ out there, right next to you,” she tells him. “You didn’t let me die, Doctor. I never died at all.”

His face constricts as he makes to escape her hold again. “Don’t,” he chokes out, but she holds on to him while the scene flickers in and out of focus around them, going from the TARDIS’ library to a room that is much colder, the walls white, sterile and suffocating.

There’s a table with a body on it, a sheet covering it up.

“No no no no…” the Doctor mutters, clutching at his hair again.

“Listen to me, whatever you saw, it wasn’t me.”

“But it _was_,” he almost chokes. “It was you, Rose.”

“I need you to believe me,” she pleads again. “I’m right there, in bed next to you, ’m using our bond to reach you. This…_thing_ you saw, it was a clone, it wasn’t me. I am not dead.”

“No!”

Again, the scene shifts, everything turning white and bright for a moment, to the point where Rose fears he’s actually in the process of pushing her out.

But when everything comes back into focus, she’s still with him, in another memory. This one is much more recent. He’s not hiding in one of his previous incarnations anymore.

This is _him_.

They’re on the couch, the way they often are, Rose’s legs crossed at the ankle, feet resting on the coffee table. The Doctor’s head is on her lap, his specs low on his nose; his body being too long for regular sized furniture, he’s lying at a slight angle, his legs up over the back of the couch. All ten of her fingers are in his hair while he reads his book out loud. She recognises the excerpt from the book they’d been reading together at the time she was taken.

This is a memory from one of their last matching days off.

Rose chooses to remain quiet, getting lost in this comforting domesticity, something she’s missed as much as she’s missed everything about him these past twelve weeks.

_It’s real enough to me_, he’d said, and she gets it, despite being aware that she’s not in their living room with her husband’s head on her lap, being soothed by the sound of his voice. It does feel real, from the soft, thick texture of his hair between her fingers, to the small, familiar shivers traveling through his scalp whenever she lets her nails graze it slowly.

“Doctor?” she says softly after a while, interrupting his reading.

He looks up at her passed the rim of his glasses, making a small, inquisitive sound.

“I need you to wake up,” she tells him thickly.

As she expected, her words cause his ever present pain to resurface from where it was carefully hidden. He shakes his head, unable to speak at first, while Rose’s fingers carry on moving slowly in his hair.

“I can’t wake up,” he eventually says. “When I wake up, you’re gone.”

His pain is her pain, unable to decipher one from the other in that moment.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “For what you had to go through. But I am alive. I know you’ve been hearing me, trying to reach out.”

He shakes his head upon her lap. “It can’t be,” he insists.

“I was on a ship,” she explains quietly. “There was some sort of device there that kept me from reaching out properly, this is why you only heard echoes.”

As she says this, he instinctively brings up the memory of one of these many echoes, and the sound of her mental call ripples around them while he tenses against her.

_Doctor…_

“But I lost you,” he almost chokes. “I lost the feel of you.”

Until now, she’s been careful in the way she let her mind interact with his, unable to prevent their emotions to blend, yet still holding back. She focuses her thoughts, now, cautious and slow, seeking him _deeper_, the way he’d taught her how.

He reacts to her at once, his physical form sucking in a sharp breath, before his ‘body’ breaks into shudders, his yearning for her oscillating through their bond in response to the soft press of her.

_Can you feel me now?_ she asks him without words, already turning the press of her mind into a rush, until yearning becomes pleasure.

_Rose…_

Her name echoes the way his had moments ago as everything shifts and dissolves, all of his focus on the sensations she’s creating, unable to keep on projecting memories. He’s returning the pressure and the rush, and a kind of heat that has nothing to do with flesh, bones and nerve endings sizzles through her.

“_It’s all about knowing which parts of the brain are affected by the actual stimulation,” _he once told her, back when they were experimenting with this particular aspect of their telepathic bond, and she’d been struggling with how…_abstract_ this was.

She’s not struggling today, so touch-starved from him that she’s not fully in charge of the way she’s melding with him. She still remains the one setting the tone and pace, as she often tends to be, her mind unable not to associate their rousing pleasure with the physical act itself.

They’re on a bed, yet not really, the shifting room around them taking on the decors of several places at once, from their bedroom to that hotel room they once shared in Norway.

There’s no place for rationality, memories blending with the _now_ and the entanglement of their minds.

He’s above her, and she’s wrapped so _tightly_ around him, clinging to him and squeezing him between her legs, his breath scorching hot upon her skin as he sways with her and into her; he’s not _here_ at all, she knows that, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s so deep inside of her, as deep as she is inside of him, and the sheer relief and bliss of it after months of missing him is almost too much, too quickly and too fast, yet not enough, never enough.

Pleasure swells, expands and spreads with the synchronicity of well-attuned minds, soon reaching a blinding peak that turns everything white once more.

The wave recedes just as swiftly, and they remain on that bed, yet not really; everything is blurry, now, except for the feel of the other, _inside_. She can’t help but picture him with his forehead pressed between her breasts, the way he often is, after, yet her chest isn’t heaving, their skins aren’t slick with perspiration, and his breath is slow and deep.

Despite this lack of physical evidence, she senses how _loose_ everything in him has become, completely opened to her. It’s still there, the undercurrent of his sorrow, but he cannot ignore her anymore, their connection as real and strong as it was on the day she was taken from him.

He doesn’t need to raise his head to meet her eyes, because she already sees him, as much as he sees her.

_Do you trust me?_ her mind whispers to his.

His reply is instantaneous, from his mind into hers.

_I trust you_.

“Then wake up,” she tells him, speaking the words out loud to his sleeping self.

Against her, the Doctor wakes up.

_..._

Keeping oneself trapped in ‘happy memories’ is more difficult than one thinks – especially when one possesses a subconscious that is determined on making you suffer.

The excess of alcohol he flooded his system with these past three months did make most of his recent memories hazy and hard to decipher, as most of his days have blended together in a blur of drunkenness, nausea and intoxicated slumber.

He didn’t start drinking right away, though.

There are memories from those first few _hours_ without her that are so clear, their edges are sharp as razors. His denial had been deep, back then, despite her throbbing absence in his head.

Until he stood in the heavy stillness of the morgue, looking down at his wife’s corpse.

Denial or not, there comes a point when a brilliant mind like his cannot ignore the evidence anymore. All living things die, after all, even Time Lords. Feeble humans with their one life and their squishy bodies are particularly susceptible to death.

And the fact is, his Rose, his beautiful, undefeatable Rose, died that day, the memory of it anything but hazy.

It is crisp and unforgivable.

Even deep as he is inside happier, simpler, almost _random_ times, his own subconscious battles for dominance, forcing him to acknowledge that fact over and over again: he’d allowed her to die, her and the small life growing within her. She’d been his favourite person, his best friend and soul mate, unknowingly carrying the most precious of gift, and he’d not been there to either protect them, or to die with them.

He does not deserve peace, contentment or forgetfulness.

Still, the Doctor tries, anything if not a tad stubborn.

His subconscious fights hard.

Pretending to be Rose, somehow ‘back from the dead’, trying to trick him into leaving the safety of his mind and back into this cold, nauseating world in which she’s gone; a world where he cannot even cry for her, forbidden to find any kind of relief from this festering pain.

There’s a great deal of confusion going on, for a while.

He’s confused when his memories begin to change against his will. He’s confused when ‘Rose’ starts telling him she’s alive and well outside his head. He’s confused when he finds himself flooded with sensations that are far more pleasant than anything he’s felt in months.

He’s confused because at this point, the feel of her has become so clear and genuine, her presence is almost tangible inside of him. And it makes absolutely no sense because Rose is _dead_.

He saw her body, had it buried the way humans do, and he’s spent every single day and every single night since then slowly trying to join her.

But when the Doctor opens his eyes, Rose _is_ there, the way she assured him she would be, their foreheads pressed together, one of her hands deep in his hair, his arms loosely wrapped around her.

He instinctively jerks back from her in shock, enough to get a better look at her through his haze, meeting a pair of eyes that are as real as they’ve ever been, and he swears his singular heart is trying to work its way out of his throat, even as her fingers move in his hair, slow and soothing.

“Rose?” he hears himself saying in a hoarse whisper, instinctively tightening his arms around her, as if to prove a point to himself – the point being that Rose _is_ in bed with him, not a figment of his imagination.

He feels the sturdiness and softness of her body as it becomes pressed against his, one of his hands already slipping under layers of clothes over her back, and the heat of her skin is so…_alive_.

“’t’s alright, love,” she whispers. “I’m here.”

He feels every single one of her fingers in his hair, too, his scalp a mess of tingles that soon shoot down his spine, and her breath is warm against his face as she whispers a couple more sweet reassurances his brain doesn’t entirely process, too busy processing _her_.

Something in him makes a decision. Not his conscious, confused self, but a decision is made, deciding he’s going to start believing it, now. He needs to cling to her _more_, though, to feel her _more_ as something huge and ruthless grows within him. When he tightens his hold on her, she tightens hers, too, both her arms around his neck, one leg wrapped around him, and she quakes with small tremors when he presses his nose upon her cheekbone and breathes her in, deeply.

The smell of her is intoxicating, this small sample making him yearn for _more_, instinctively seeking one of her pulsing points even as that merciless weight on his lungs makes it progressively harder to breathe. He moves until his face is buried into the crook of her neck, so that the next time he breathes in, he gets a lungful of _her_ so potent that his entire body breaks into a wave of shudders, his face pinned so tightly to her skin and the jugular beneath that he _feels_ her thumping heartbeat.

With his next exhale, he begins to sob.

Considering how often and easily he used to cry prior to losing her, the fact that this is the first time he actually cries since _that day_ is all kind of ironic. When he lost her, there had been fury, anguish and despair; above all else, there had been this overpowering _numbness_, as if the depth of his pain went way beyond what little reprieve tears could bring him.

As he drowns into the feel and smell of her, he cries in a way he’s never cried before, as if he’d kept it all in for her. Despite the sheer relief trying to pierce through his heavy _confusion_, his pain continues to dominate over any other emotion. Entwined as they are, they are both physically affected by the force of the spasms wracking his entire frame, the gut-wrenching sounds of his sorrow barely muffled against her skin.

He’s too in shock to wonder about the _hows_ and the _whys_; all he can do is feel her and her body and her presence in his head as she tries to soothe him, even as she battles with her own pain.

_That_’s what changes first. The feel of her, inside.

There is…movement.

It’s an odd kind of movement he doesn’t recognise at all, especially since she’s the one feeling it, but they’re so tightly connected, he feels its echo. There is a change in her mind, and he senses that, too, the instinctive way she shifts her focus from him to…something else.

Someone else.

It’s impossible to hide anything when two minds are bonded the way theirs are in that moment. It’s in her head, therefore it is in his, too. Rose feels the new shockwave that goes through him, just as he feels her subsequence rush of apprehension.

He pulls himself from her, just enough to meet her eyes and confirm what she’s already told him without words. He moves with a kind of energy that is almost manic, pulling at the covers that still hid most of their bodies, moving down upon the mattress until he’s levelled with her midsection. He’s a lot more gentle when he takes a hold of her hoodie and the shirt beneath, and pulls upward.

To an untrained eye, the changes would be almost unnoticeable. But this is _Rose_’s body, the body he has come to know better than any of the ones he’s possessed in his long life. The changes are small, the new dips and curves barely visible from this angle, but they are real.

When he looks up and meets her eyes, she bites down on her lip, fresh tears spilling down on her already tearstained face, sensing her uncertainty as much as he’s seeing it.

“Surprise?” she whispers, her quiet tone not enough to conceal the wobble in that one word; the fear in her heart is unbearable.

This is not a surprise, any of this.

It’s a bloody _miracle_.

The Doctor cannot speak, cannot do much of anything besides cry, apparently, flooding her mind with _warmth_ and love instead as he moves back up, sinking a hand in her hair to pull her to him, until their foreheads and noses are nothing short of squished together, letting her feel the depth of his joy and gratitude beyond his disbelief.

He’s kissing her wet skin, then, every inch of it he can reach without letting her go, from her cheekbones to her nose, to her jaw and her lips, back to her cheeks and chin and down her throat, every press of his lips soft and reverent, until he’s burrowing his whole face against her neck once more, his reserve of tears seemingly endless.

He cannot stay still more than a minute, though, his curiosity and fascination getting the best of him already, muttering a hoarse “Sorry I just…” as he slides back down the length of her body, which she’s turned to give him better access, lying on her back.

He reaches out a tentative hand towards her lower abdomen, until his trembling fingers are resting upon a skin that is a lot more tense and firm than it used to be, amazed by the feel of it. Once again, he’s too shell-shocked to think rationally about any of this, aware that he should be asking some important questions.

He finds himself with his ear pressed upon Rose’s stomach instead, his eyes closed shut as he listens, one of her hands already back in his hair, the other one cupping his scruffy face. The excess of adrenaline flooding his blood makes it easy for him to access his Time Lord senses, quickly finding her heartbeat, a sound he is well-accustomed to. Within moments, he picks up on a much faster rhythm, and it is without a doubt the most beautiful sound he has ever heard. He raises his hand as he listens, curling his fingers around hers upon his cheek, and squeezing.

The sound of their heartbeats, combined with the feel of her, finally calms him down almost completely.

He reopens his eyes, eventually, meeting her gaze, although they don’t speak for another long minute, her fingers soft in his hair, her thumb slowly caressing the corner of his mouth. Now that he’s calmer, he’s somewhat more aware of the strain on both their minds, equally affected by the ongoing intensity of their connection after being deprived of it for so long. Rose seems to be even more drained than him, instantly concerned about the toll that going into his mind took on her.

Without breaking their eye contact, the Doctor slowly dims their bond, not breaking it completely, but lessening its strength so that it doesn’t require as much energy. They cannot feel each other’s emotions anymore, but it barely changes anything, their eyes saying quite enough.

“Where did you go?” he eventually asks. His voice, barely louder than a whisper, is hoarse from his recent breakdown.

Her face constricts, and he knows she’s nibbling on the inside of her lip. “I was abducted,” she breathes out. His sudden rush of worry must have shown on his face or trickled through their dim connection, because she quickly adds: “I’m okay. They treated me…really well, actually. Like I was some kind of goddess or something.”

He blinks tiredly at her, the way she’s nibbling on her lip anything but subtle, now.

“A goddess, eh?” he repeats. “I suppose it was only a matter of time before the rest of the universe caught up with that."

His weak attempt at humour is commendable, but this is way too raw for any of them to even smile from it.

Again, he should ask her details about who took her exactly, find out what their intentions were, and if it means they’ll come after her again, but he’s too tired to string complex sentences together – which does not happen often.

“How did you get back?” he does ask her.

“Got some help,” she admits, before swallowing hard – not a good sign. “Donna and…the Doctor,” she breathes out. “They crossed back over to this universe when you…”

For the first time since he left the relative safety of his mind, he remembers _why_ he’d ended up trapped in his own head in the first place, and from the look in her eyes, she’s well aware of what he’s been up to.

Something painful and shameful crawls out of his gut and swiftly begins to spread, closing his eyes so he doesn’t have to see the way she’s undoubtedly going to start looking at him, soon. The truth is, he wouldn’t blame her for finding him pitiful and maybe even a bit repulsive, especially since she’s obviously just been rescued by another version of himself, one that did not spend the last twelve weeks drinking himself to death or occasionally overdosing on sleeping pills.

Enough of this sudden surge of self-loathing must have travelled through their bond, because Rose immediately increases their connection. She pulls him _upward_, both physically and mentally, until he’s uncurling himself and moving back up, even as she starts flooding his mind with emotions that are quick to trigger new tears, soon back to clinging to one another so tightly it is almost painful.

He feels how much she missed him and yearned for him, how sorry she is for the pain she caused him while she tried reaching out for him, how scared she’s been, not really for her but for their baby and for him, how relieved she is, to be here with him now.

How it doesn’t matter, that the TARDIS is only a few rooms down from where they are, with his original self in it.

_I’m yours_, her mind whispers to his. _For better or for worse, yeah?_

With the salt of her tears upon his lips and the press of her body so tight against his, the Doctor chooses to believe her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It will be at least a couple of weeks again before I can post the next and last chapter, as it's going to be a big one, and I won't have time to write at all next weekend.
> 
> I would love to hear your thoughts or feelings about this chapter ♥


	7. VII.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter decided to be a pain in my backside for a very long time, and Real Life certainly did not help. But I can be quite stubborn, so I managed to kick its butt too, eventually. Thank you so much, to all of you still reading, and for your unwavering support, on this story or all the others.
> 
> Once again, sliiight feel!warning for this chapter, which is rather lengthy. Hopefully it makes up for the long wait ;-)

**VII.**

Rose wakes up starving, and with an uncomfortable need to pee.

She doesn’t immediately give in to these urges, reluctant to leave the warmth of her husband’s arms. He’s wrapped himself around her, her back pressed to his chest, their fingers intertwined near her midsection.

She can’t remember falling asleep herself, although she does remember him succumbing to exhaustion long before she did, as if he hadn’t properly slept in weeks.

She wants nothing more than to stay here in the warm cocoon of his embrace, his breathing deep and slow against the sensitive skin of her neck. It’s so easy to pretend nothing’s happened at all, concealed as they are in the dark; moving means acknowledging the fact that, she might have made it back, there is no ‘miracle cure’ for what happened. Nothing that will make up for the pain he’s gone through…him and her family.

Her physical discomfort forces her to move, eventually, and the Doctor jolts awake the moment she begins turning in his arms, quickly finding his gaze in the dim light, his eyes blurry and alarmed.

“’s okay,” she murmurs, one of her hands already up to his face, cupping his scruffy cheek.

He lets out a long, quivering sigh as he pulls her to him, pressing their faces together, his arms tight around her. They remain like this for a long moment, simply taking the other in.

“I’ve gotta go eat something…” she whispers against his lips after some time.

Even though she feels him nodding faintly in response, Rose does not move at all, pinned to him, her thumb caressing a hairless spot high on his cheekbone, while the rest of her fingers move slowly through his hair, using their dim connection to soothe him back to sleep.

Her unavoidable need to relieve her bladder eventually drags her out of bed, all too aware that she _really_ needs to eat. Considering the exertion she’s put herself through, and the small inhabitant currently sharing her body, she’s got to take better care of herself.

After using the bathroom, she makes a brief detour by the living room on her way to the kitchen to grab a blanket, which she wraps tightly around herself as she walks through the dark house. She tries not to think too much about the fact that the TARDIS appears to have gone from the entrance hall, but she can’t help wondering if _he_’s gone without saying goodbye – something she should be getting used to by now.

(she doesn’t think she ever will)

She’s only mildly surprised to find her mother already in the kitchen, sitting alone at the large table, lost in her thoughts. Only a second passes between the moment Rose enters the room and the moment Jackie escapes her own head, but that one second and the look on her mother’s face is enough to cause Rose’s insides to twist.

“You’re up early!” Jackie exclaims a tad too brightly, her warm smile bravely concealing something much darker.

Rose frowns. “Not as early as you.”

Her Mum shrugs, waving a dismissive hand. “Been having trouble sleepin’ lately, is all.” Although she does a good job at making it sound trivial, Rose’s guilt is already burning at the back of her throat. “No matter,” her Mum continues bravely. “How did it go? We all figured it must’ve worked, since you didn’t come out of the room.”

“It did work,” Rose confirms a bit wearily, averting her eyes as she takes a seat opposite her, not expending on her answer.

She _did_ get the Doctor out of his head, but she cannot bring herself to be entirely thrilled about it, left raw by the intensity of his grief.

She feels her mother’s eyes on her, having no doubt that everything she’s left unsaid has been heard anyway.

“You must be starving,” Jackie points out as she jumps on her feet, happy to carry on with the pretending.

“I really am, yeah,” Rose admits.

Her mother is already at the fridge, door opened, gauging its content. “Craving anything specific?”

Rose doesn’t miss this odd choice of word, swallowing hard. “Just…food, really.”

“Eggs and bacon it is, then,” her Mum says, having spent enough years raising her to know what her preferred foods are.

They don’t speak for a while, the silence only broken by the sizzling ingredients as they cook in the pan.

“Where’s Tony?” Rose eventually asks when her Mum puts a glass of orange juice in front of her – another oddity; her mother’s fondness for a ‘cuppa’ is well known and unmatchable.

“Upstairs in bed,” Jackie answers. “We haven’t told him anything yet, figured it would be best to wait ‘til things settled down a bit.”

Rose nods, sipping on her juice, not daring to ask the other question that is booming in her head.

“They’re coming back,” her Mum says anyway, having clearly read her mind again…or simply recognised the look on her daughter’s face. “Told us they had some things that needed ‘sorting out’, but they did say they’d be back.”

Rose can only nod again as her mother sets the plate of warm food in front of her.

“Now don’t be mad, I know you don’t like it when I butt in, but I’ve gone and booked an appointment with my gyno for you. Dunno what kind of care you received these past three months, and if you’d rather not talk about it I’ll back off, but I figured you probably want to get seen by an actual doctor.”

The shock that travels through Rose is enough to make her forget all about the enticing food, looking up at her Mum with genuine surprise.

“How…” she barely manages to articulate, her throat already closing up again. She has no doubt it’s only a matter of moments before she starts blubbering again.

Her Mum can tell, too, cupping her cheek in her hand. “Don’t think you’re aware of it, but your face’s rounded up quite a bit. I looked just like that when I was pregnant with you, a lot more than I did with Tony. Maybe it’s a first child thing.”

There is nothing Rose can do to stop the flow of tears, then, an amalgam of guilt, relief and fear taking over her.

Jackie is all too happy to wrap her daughter in her arms and cradle her head to her chest, in that loving, nurturing way that makes Rose feel much younger than she is as she cries into her mother’s jumper.

“’m sorry,” she eventually manages to sniffle, feeling overwhelmed yet a lot lighter than she did only minutes ago.

“Don’t be daft,” Jackie says, kissing the top of her head. “You’ve done absolutely nothing wrong.”

“You all thought I was dead.”

“We sure did,” Jackie agrees. “Still not sure how that’s your fault, though.”

There really isn’t anything Rose can say to that, deciding to hold her mother tighter instead.

“To be perfectly honest, I feel like I should be the one apologising,” Jackie tells her, her voice unusually subdued.

Rose pulls away, looking up at her. “What for?”

Her mother swallows hard. “I…don’t think I did the best I could, with that husband of yours while you were…” She shakes her head. “I tried, sweetheart, I really did. But it all became too much.”

Rose shakes her head, too. “Don’t. I know how difficult he gets when he’s hurting. If he decided to push you out, the way ‘m sure he did, there was nothing you could’ve done.”

Jackie nods, swiftly wiping the tears that have rolled down her cheeks, before grabbing Rose’s face in her hands again, pressing a resonating kiss to her forehead.

Soon, the two of them are back to hugging, spending quite some time like that, talking in muffled, teary voices. The food, when Rose finally gets around to eating it, is long cold.

It’s rarely tasted better.

…

This is not going to be easy. Whatever _this_ is.

His head throbs, his muscles ache, and every inch of him seems decided on shivering more or less forcefully.

The Doctor is smart enough to understand what is causing his body to revolt the way it is today, having experienced enough ‘lucid’ moments of withdrawals these past twelve weeks to recognise the symptoms. He’s actually surprised he’s not feeling _worse_, to be perfectly honest.

He still finds himself in a rather tricky situation, not wanting to alarm Rose, all the while feeling rather embarrassed for having put himself in this situation in the first place. His solution, unsurprisingly, is to pretend he’s too tired to get out of bed.

In other words, he’s hiding.

This, as it turns out, only works to some extent; he has no illusion whatsoever about fooling his wife, who remains as perceptive as ever when it comes to him and his volatile moods.

She pops in and out of the room, obviously torn between spending time with the people outside of it, and spending time with him in here. He doesn’t mind how she attempts to counter his misery every time she joins him in bed, usually by burying all ten of her fingers in his hair to massage his scalp, her lips pressed to his clammy forehead.

“I’ve got to go out for a bit,” she tells him at some point. “Pete’s taking me to Torchwood, there’s some urgent things that need sorting out.”

“Okay.”

“’t’ll only be for a couple of hours, tops,” she adds, as if she’s trying to justify herself.

If he’d been in _any_ kind of better mindset, he would have reassured her, told her he understood; of _course_ she had things to do, people to see, papers to sign to prove that she was, as it were, not dead at all.

Unfortunately for her, he’s miserable, achy and nauseous, which means that all he wants is for her to stay right there under the covers, so that he can keep his hands under her shirt, breathing in the smell of her while her fingers caress his hair.

He manages a small nod, eventually, grimacing as pain shoots through his neck, his head throbbing in tandem. He senses her growing guilt, and forces himself to think about her and to stop being an arse, sending a fleeting wave of reassurance her way.

“I’ll be fine,” he assures her quietly.

She does leave, after a while, and he is _fine_…for the most part.

He’s beginning to wonder how on Earth he’s ever going to manage to leave this room at all, though. His thoughts are much clearer than they’ve been in weeks, forcing him to regularly focus on the fact that somewhere beyond that door is _Jackie Tyler_, namely the one person who tried helping him time and time again while he was spiralling out of control – incidentally the one person who also happens to have seen him at his worst.

He should have known that _hiding_ would not stop his mother-in-law.

Little more than half-an-hour has passed since Rose left that there is a knock on the door. That noise is…odd, louder and _lower_ than one would expect, giving the Doctor a clear mental image of a foot being used to bang against the wood.

His suspicions are confirmed a moment later when Jackie’s muffled voice rings through the door. “Open up, will you? My arms are full!”

He briefly entertains the idea of remaining where he is, curled up under the covers, until she goes away…only to realise that she is not going to go away, more likely to just drop whatever she’s carrying and barge in to shout at him.

His aching brain hoping to avoid any unnecessary loud noises, he drags himself out of bed, instantly shivering even more forcefully as he loses the warmth that had gathered under the covers. He goes to open the door, finding himself staring down at Jackie, who’s carrying a breakfast tray overflowing with food, the smell of which quickly causes his stomach to turn.

She peers up at him, pinching her lips in a familiar, disapproving scowl. “You look like hell,” she notes, swiftly moving forwards, giving him no other choice but to step aside.

He carefully closes the door as she walks to the bed, taking a seat upon it, setting the tray on her lap.

“Come now,” she says, a tad too cheerfully – and a tad too loudly for his headache. “I’ve made all your favourites, and it’s getting cold.”

But the Doctor cannot move, unable to even look at her, his throat closing up while the back of it begins to burn with bile, a similar sensation prickling in his eyes.

His memories of the past two weeks are fuzzy at best, as he’s spent most of his days and nights drunk out of his mind, but he’s fairly certain that the last time he’d seen Jackie, it had ended with him _physically_ pushing her out of the flat while drunkenly slurring at her…something along the lines of being fed up with her constantly barging in on him, and that if she was that desperate to mother someone who wasn’t dead, she still had one child left at home to do that with.

And here she is, now, with a full English breakfast getting cold on her lap.

He’s felt shame a great too many times throughout his existence, but never quite to this extent, the feeling of it twisting at his insides.

“Doctor.”

The subdued call forces him to reopen his eyes and look at her. All things considered, she rarely uses his chosen name, more partial to using a variety of nicknames that are rarely _pleasant_ in essence; she definitely isn’t one to speak to him in that kind of tone.

There is no more scowl on her face, her recent grief still visible and raw in her tired eyes. “Come here,” she repeats with a tilt of her head, patting the bed next to her.

He does join her, sinking onto the mattress with another pained grimace, his whole body shuddering. He stares at his trembling fingers, still unable to look at her, even when she rests a gentle hand on his back.

“I don’t much like hypocrites,” she tells him. “I like saying what I think, when I think it, and I really don’t see the point of pretending everything’s fine and dandy when it’s not. So it’d make me feel iffy, to just pretend like nothin’s happened, that everything’s nice and pretty now because Rose wasn’t _really_ dead.”

He sucks in a quivering breath, and she pats his back a couple of times. “We know better, you, me and Pete,” she continues. “Rose knows it too. She gets things like that, always have. And I reckon she’d be all too ready to take on the blame for what’s happened.”

All he can do is nod in assent, unable to say anything, his throat painfully tight, now.

“I won’t let her,” Jackie states, fiercely. “It’s not her burden to bear, ‘specially not now, bearing enough as it is. So I won’t tell her, what happened while she was gone. Nothing beyond what she needs to know, anyway. I’m not gonna ask you not to tell her either, that’s not my place. What goes on between you two is between you two, and I’ve seen enough to know you’re very honest with each other. But as far as I’m concerned, the last three months…they’re in the past, now. They happened, and they weren’t pretty, but it’s over, now. That includes everything that was said or done. I’m moving on, all right? And I’m hoping you’ll do the same.”

Tears drip from his nose onto his lap, and he pointlessly tries wiping off his face with a trembling hand, nodding his head.

“I’m sorry,” he manages to say, forcing the words out of his throat with great difficulty, his constricted voice thick with tears.

Jackie gives his shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I know. But we got her back. That’s all that matters, now.”

He nods again, still hopelessly trying to clean off his face, even as his whole body shakes with a new wave of shudders. Jackie’s hand moves from his shoulder to his forehead, which feels warm and clammy even to him.

“You’re a real mess, you are,” she says with a hint of disapproval, but her tone remains motherly and concerned. “I’ll go fetch you some painkillers. If nothin’ else, try eating some toasts, all right? You’ve got some thickening up to do.”

She stands up, leaving the tray on the bed next to him, already halfway to the door when he speaks again.

“Thank you,” he tells her in a hoarse voice.

She gives him a look, pursing her lips in a way that is a lot more familiar and comforting.

“She married you,” she reminds him with a small shake of her head, her mock dismay somewhat of a running gag between them. “I suppose it means we’re stuck with each other.”

He supposes they are, indeed.

…

When they rematerialise the TARDIS into the entrance hall, the Doctor is anything but surprised to find Jackie waiting outside of it, obviously unable to resist that one particular pull.

She stares at them as they step out of the ship, a glass of water in hand.

“Took you long enough,” she says in way of greetings. “Thought you weren’t coming back. Again.”

He just can’t win with this particular human, can he? Even when he’s the one who’s actually _rescued_ her daughter only half a day ago.

(although he supposes she’s got reasons to be distrustful)

“I told you we would be back,” the Doctor replies, rather tersely.

To say that his mood has become _abysmal_ would be a gross understatement.

“What’re you up to, anyway?” Jackie asks, still peering at them.

The Doctor exchanges a look with Donna, wordlessly agreeing that there is no point in lying…not that she needs to know everything in details either.

“We went back,” Donna says. “To that ship where Rose and her team were held captive. We had to make sure they wouldn’t…try that again.”

“Killed them all, did you?”

Both Donna and the Doctor make a similar face. “We don’t _kill_,” the Doctor protests.

“We merely intimidate,” Donna adds.

“Whatever you say,” Jackie responds with a wave of her hand. “She’ll be safe, then?”

They exchange another look. “From this particular group of aliens, yes,” the Doctor confirms. “That’s a conversation we need to have with her, though. There’s a couple of things we can put in place to ensure her safety. Is she…”

He cannot bring himself to ask if she’s with _him_ – because of course she would be.

But Jackie shakes her head. “She’s at Torchwood with her dad,” she says. “Shouldn’t be long before she’s back, though.”

“And how’s…” Donna starts, her turn to let her sentence hang, as if the Doctor’s metacrisis self was becoming a forbidden word.

Jackie shrugs with a bit of a grimace. “As well as you’d expect, given what he’s done to himself. Was about to go back there, actually,” she adds, indicating the glass of water she’s holding, along with what appears to be a box of pills.

“Let me,” the Doctor offers, extending a hand.

Both women stare at him.

“I promise the universe won’t implode from the two of us being in the same room,” he tells them, irritated.

“Your head might,” Donna states, a tad too cheekily, and he glares at her. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Good thing I’m not asking for your opinion, then,” the Doctor retorts, and he nearly cringes at the bitterness dripping from his voice. She is _so_ going to make him pay for this excess of arsiness. He turns to Jackie, whose expression is hardly better. “There are things I should discuss with him, too. Unless he’s too comatose to handle a conversation. Either way, it won’t take long.”

Jackie reluctantly hands over the pills and the water. “Play nice,” she tells him, and the warning note in her voice only causes him to glower some more.

As he walks to the guestroom, he can’t help chastising himself, well aware that this is, indeed, a bad idea. He’s as unable to stop himself from going back there as he was the previous day, when he decided he needed to witness Rose reuniting with…_him_.

There’s something a tad sadistic and self-flagellating in this new choice, along with something uncomfortably…conceited, as he absolutely believes himself to have the upper hand over his counterpart at the moment, on many levels.

When he reaches the door, he gives the wood a brisk couple of knocks.

“Come in,” his own voice answers from behind the door.

When he does, he finds his counterpart sitting at the edge of the bed, a breakfast tray lying next to him, an untouched piece of toast in hand.

He does not look good.

His pale face somehow becomes even greyer when he realises who’s just come in, probably expecting Jackie. He doesn’t maintain eye contact, his entire body locking with tension, his frame visibly quivering. The Doctor takes in all these symptoms, frowning in what undoubtedly looks like disapproval.

“How much pain are you in?” he inquires, making an effort to keep his voice neutral.

The other Doctor swallows hard. “I’ve experienced worse,” he replies tersely, before his entire body is shaken by shudders.

These obvious signs of withdrawals mean the clearing fluids they gave him only worked to some extent.

“There are…treatments,” the Doctor tells him, curtly. “Counteragents I could give you. It would make this pass faster.”

But his more human self shakes his head, keeping his gaze to the floor.

“What exactly are you trying to prove?” the Doctor cannot help but ask, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice anymore.

Another shake of the head. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

His irritation flares. “Try me,” he replies, his voice now dripping with sarcasm. “My ability to understand your psyche might actually surprise you.”

The other Doctor raises his head, looking up at him. “That’s not what I meant. We might share the same experiences and memories, it’s been long enough since our paths have diverged for our thinking not to be the same anymore – something you very well know indeed. Otherwise, you wouldn’t assume I’m trying to 'prove something'. If anything else, I’m only trying to learn from our mistakes.”

The Doctor is not liking where this is going at all. “Last time I checked, you’re the only one of us who turned into an alcoholic.”

The other Doctor stares at him, clearly unbothered by his low blow. “Whatever shame you’re trying to make me feel, it’s pointless. I’m way ahead of you on that.”

They stare at one another, the tension in the air making it obvious they are not _meant_ to be here, together in the same room, under those circumstances.

“I just…don’t get it,” the Doctor eventually says.

His words are vague, but apparently, they still share enough brain patterns, as his counterpart doesn’t seem confused at all by his admission.

Because he himself has lost Rose. Several times. Too many times. And yes, it’s always led to some recklessness, that’s a fact.

But never to this degree.

“No, you wouldn’t,” the other Doctor eventually replies. “Not sure I completely understand it myself. Maybe it’s human weakness. Maybe it has to do with the degree of intimacy. All I know is that I reacted the way we always do. Recklessly, and irrationally. Taking a magic pill to get rid of the side-effects won’t change what happened. It’ll just…conceal it.”

“So that’s your solution?” the Doctor asks. “Going through days if not weeks of withdrawal instead, forcing her to go through it all with you?”

He shakes his head again. “She won’t see it that way,” he speaks quietly, almost softly.

“Her mistake,” the Doctor replies, cold and resentful.

Above all, he is _hurt_.

Because at the roots of it all, for all of his condescending attitude, he’s the one condemned to spend the rest of his existence without Rose and her maddening, unwavering support.

His counterpart understands that implicitly, looking at him with unbearable _empathy_.

And there’s nothing _he_ can say, really…although he does speak, eventually.

“Thank you,” he says, his voice suddenly a lot thicker. “For bringing her back.”

The Doctor averts his eyes at last, unable to bear the raw look in _these_ eyes, remembering Rose standing in his console room, and the look on _her_ face when she’d asked him to take her home.

To _him_.

The Doctor doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even nod. He puts both water and pills on a nearby dresser, and leaves the room.

Defeated.

…

The first thing Rose notices when she comes home is the TARDIS in the entrance hall. She doesn’t linger, anything but ready to deal with the Doctor inside of it.

Her Mum intercepts her on her way to the guestroom. “He’s not in there anymore.”

Rose turns around. “Where is he, then?”

Jackie points upwards. “In your room, I reckon. He’s been feeling a bit rough, tried hiding most of the morning. He disappeared up there after the other one went and had a chat with him.”

Rose hesitates, aware that her Mum would want nothing more than to spend some time with her, but she’s _aching_ to go find her husband, now.

“Just go,” Jackie tells her. “You being home’s probably the only thing that’ll cheer him up, today.”

Rose doesn’t need any persuading; he’s kept their bond dimmed all morning, enough to feel each other’s presence in the background, but not enough to get any indication on how he was doing.

She lets herself inside the bedroom quietly, finding it seemingly empty, although the door to the en suite bathroom is opened, light streaming out of it. Rose locks the main door behind her, ensuring some privacy, before walking to the bathroom, sneaking her head through the opening. In spite of their connection, he doesn’t immediately realise she’s here, his back turned, only seeing part of his profile.

He’s standing in front of the sink, which is filled with water, the lower half of his face covered with shaving cream; he’s taken his shirt off, a towel draped over his shoulder. The cloth is not enough to conceal the state of him, and her throat clenches at the prominence of his bones under his skin.

Aware that she might startle him, she waits until he’s rinsing the razor before making her presence known.

“Hey…” she calls out softly.

The Doctor _does_ startle, a lot more than she anticipated, actually dropping the razor in the sink as he jumps in surprise. The shocked look on his face when he turns around could have been amusing, if it hadn’t been so heart-breaking. Everything inside of her seems to squeeze at his genuine incredulity and jittery state.

His shock doesn’t last, quickly replaced by sheer relief; it isn’t quite enough to chase the haunted look in his eyes.

She’s walked to him in the next couple of seconds, and he doesn’t waste any time either, entrapping her in a tight hug, his creamy face pressed to her neck. Rose squeezes him to her with equal strength, shivering at the long, relieved sigh that soon escapes him, warm air pooling against her skin. He’s trembling, his skin clammy under her palms, despite the freshly showered smell of it.

He pulls his face away almost abruptly, grimacing as he stares at what she guesses are now her cream-covered shirt, hair and neck.

“Sorry,” he breathes out. “Not my smartest move.”

“It’ll come off,” she tells him quietly, slowly running a hand through his hair, and he leans into her touch, his eyes already closing; her own gaze takes in the patches of cleared skin he’s already uncovered, focusing particularly on the few streaks of blood that have trickled down his pale cheek. “You don’t seem to be doing this very well.”

He gives a brief shake of his head as he reopens his eyes, still leaning heavily against the hand buried in his hair. “My grip’s a bit…unsteady,” he admits in a low voice.

He raises his hand, his fingers noticeably shaky. She grabs them gently, bringing them to her lips to press a kiss to his knuckles, and he leans in with another sigh, resting his forehead against hers.

“Let me help you,” she suggests more than she asks, her voice barely above a whisper.

The Doctor nods, straightening up a little, before using his towel to clear off some of the shaving cream from her neck and shoulder. She hops onto the counter next to the sink, then, briefly wondering how long it will be before she can’t do things like this anymore – growing human being in her womb and all that.

Something similar must have crossed his mind (or some of her thoughts leaked into his), because his first move when he comes to stand between her legs is to slip both his hands beneath her shirt, pressing his palms on each side of her small bump as he leaned his forehead against hers again, his thumbs softly caressing her sensitive skin, causing a new wave of shivers to break under his touch.

Her own hands come to rest on his upper arms, which she squeezes gently, his muscles tight and trembling.

“Rough morning?” she asks quietly.

“More…odd than rough,” he answers with a faint shrug. “I tried hiding, and failed miserably.”

She gives his arms another squeeze, before moving her hands up and down, trying to soothe him, and loosen some of the tension away. “We’re safe for now,” she tells him softly. “Locked the door on my way in,” she adds.

She doesn’t imagine the way he steps a little closer to her at those words; while his hands remain under her shirt, they slide from her mid-section to encase her hips, which are very close to being pressed to his, and the first stirs of desire tug somewhere deep inside of her. The shift that is occurring between them is not only to be expected, it is familiar and comforting…having him so close after so long, his scent already overtaking the smells of soap and shaving cream.

Rose forces herself to pull her face away from his, and her stomach dips when she meets his gaze, which has darkened significantly.

“Let’s take care of that wild beard of yours, yeah?” she suggests, a hand back in his hair, and he gives another short nod.

She reapplies some cream to his hairy cheeks, making up for the mess they made earlier, before she fishes the razor out of the cloudy water and gets to work.

This is only the third time she gets to do this since they’ve been together in this universe.

He likes keeping a bit of a scruff going – because he knows she thoroughly enjoys it, too – regularly trimming the hair down to his preferred length with an ordinary electric razor. The few times he’s gone for a completely shaven look, he’s used cream (which is kinder to his skin, he’s claimed), happy to let Rose be the one holding the razor on each of these occasions.

There is something inherently intimate about the act itself, slowly revealing more of his soft skin with each careful stroke of her hand while he gazes at her; the fact that he’s barely blinking at all only adds to the intensity of the moment. One of her hands is pressed to his jaw, regularly tilting his head to change the angles, and that small contact is enough for her to feel the tremors that run relentlessly beneath his skin.

She’s almost done the next time his body gives another strong shudder. She stops, setting the razor down on the counter to bring her second hand to his face.

“Are you hurting?” she asks quietly, searching his eyes as her mind nudges his a little more strongly.

He shakes his head in her hands. “Not much,” he replies thickly. “I’m achy, but I mostly feel…jumpy. And very uncomfortable, like I’m not entirely in control of my nervous system. It’s hard to describe.”

Rose doesn’t say anything, wordlessly bringing a hand down to her waist to grab his, before raising it to her face. He cups her cheek in his palm, his fingers instinctively resting on her temple, the way hers are on his face.

She doesn’t have to ask.

He opens up to her, letting some of his sensations cross into her mind, and this ounce of _him_ she experiences is enough to make her shudder in turn, her grip on his hand and face tightening while her breathing halts briefly.

She feels much more than his physical discomfort, overwhelmed by his shame and that underlying grief that simply refuses to let him be.

He regrets letting her feel so much the moment it happens, quickly dimming their connection, but it’s already too late.

They don’t speak, Rose’s breathing shortened as she tries to control her emotions, her eyes now swimming with tears, turning her head in his hand so that her lips rest on his wrist. The unsaid hangs heavily in the air, all these things he did to himself when he thought her dead.

They’ve always made it a point to be honest with each other, in this universe, aware that being candid was necessary if they wanted this to work. He _feels_ her reluctance to speak, though, unable to say the words, to discuss how he’s spent the last three months slowly killing himself rather than deal with his pain.

“I’m gonna give you some time,” she eventually says against his wrist, not quietly enough to conceal how shaky her voice has become. “To…recover, and to get better,” she continues. “But as soon as I decide you can take it, I’m gonna be mad at you, for what you did to yourself.”

The Doctor swallows hard, giving another minute nod of his head, releasing her hip to mirror her, his hand coming up to cover hers on his face, feeling his own eyes prickle. “I know.”

“I mean it, too,” she insists, and a couple of tears run down her cheeks as she tightens her hold on his face. “’m gonna be absolutely furious.”

He nods again, his face constricting. “I know.”

She pulls him to her, then, and he comes more than willingly, burrowing his face in the crook of her neck as they become enwrapped in one another, arms squeezing while fingers disappear into hair or dig into flesh, the clasp of her legs around his waist keeping him tight against her.

He tries comforting her, as much as she’s trying to comfort him, even as they seek solace in one another, their bond properly open again, sharing the kind of connection that only intensifies the waves of emotions rushing from one to the other.

Beyond relief and grief, there is _need_, a need that is nearly all consuming.

He wouldn’t be able to say who initiates the meeting of their lips – not that it matters, soon kissing in a way they haven’t kissed in weeks, and a touch that was needy a moment ago becomes demanding, her fingers twisting in his hair as he tightens his hold on her waist, not allowing an inch of space between them. The mere caress of his tongue against hers is enough to ignite their insides, and the desire they experience goes beyond physical longing, aching to feel the other after months of absence. 

Rose’s yearning does more than trickle through their bond. It floods his very mind with heat and _want_, causing him to press forward and roll into her in a desperate attempt to get closer still, unable to keep an almost wounded noise from escaping his throat.

She pulls her lips away from his with a raspy gasp, her hands finding his face again, and her palms feel almost cold against his flushed cheeks.

“’m sorry,” she nearly pants, her breathing loud and laboured. “I know you’re not feeling good, maybe this isn’t a good idea…”

He doesn’t say anything, all too aware that words cannot possibly convey how he feels, tightening his holds on her again to erase whatever small distance she’s just created between them, letting his desire for her rush from his mind to hers; being as always more adept at this, the way he presses _deep_ into her is as effective as the physical press of him between her legs, and the next sound she lets out against his parted lips is a proper moan.

_Please_, he’s almost begging her.

Whatever restraint she was trying to keep shatters away, fully allowing him _in_, initiating a tight, intimate bond between their minds, her arms once again wrapped around his neck as their kissing resumes, even hungrier than before.

When she sends him a clear image of them moving to the bedroom, he doesn’t resist. Only three months ago, he would have been able to pick her up and carry her to bed; they don’t even attempt it today, the Doctor stepping away to let her slide off the counter, Rose already pulling her shirt above her head as she does so, quickly ridding herself of her bra, too.

He recaptures her lips within instants, sinking his fingers in her hair, and the feel of her chest pressed against his is almost too much; he’s properly _shaking_ now, obviously more affected than either of them wants to admit.

“Doctor…” she breathes out against his lips almost in protest, trying to push him away again, rather weakly, but her concern is genuine, prickling at his consciousness.

He pushes her worries away, responding with a new wave of longing, the sound of his name being whispered like this triggering something visceral in him, after weeks spent hearing it echoing inside his head.

_I need you…_he tells her without words, over and over again. _I need you I need you I need you…_

He feels how much she’s responding to it, to him, how her own need pulses deep, and low, his lips and tongue upon her throat, her fingers twisting his hair as the heat of her breath scorches his ear.

They are both _ridiculously_ worked up already, but it’s been a while…a very long while, and he can already tell her changing body is partly responsible for her quick responses, areas that were always sensitive to his touch suddenly even more responsive.

He wants nothing more than to take his time with her, to explore slowly and methodically, cataloguing every single change and figuring out new ways to please her…but not today, incapable of doing anything but respond to her, now, barely in charge of his own actions as he lies on his back in the middle of the bed, both bare of all clothes, and the feel of her as she slithers above him is enough to bring him ludicrously close to climax.

She’s too overwhelmed herself to be able to use their bonds the way they’ve quite masterfully used it in the past, both a bit out of practice. It doesn’t matter, because she’s there, and opened, and so completely _his_…it’s enough, more than enough.

“Rose…” he nearly chokes against her lips the next time she undulates upon him, teasing them both, all ten of his fingers entangled in her hair, keeping her as close as possible.

She’s shifting, then, reaching down between them to help him find his way home, and the moan he lets out as she takes him in resembles a cry. Through the white haze of pleasure ruthlessly taking over, he still cannot rid himself of the shame, having made such a mess of himself that he cannot _love_ her the way he should, the way she deserves to be loved, unable to do anything at all beside cling to her, overcome with sensations.

She senses his turmoil, every last bit of it, swiftly soothing it over with warmth and reassurance as she moves upon and into him, a hand still between her legs the way his usually is, shifting and pressing and rushing, and nothing else matters, nothing else exists, only her, his Rose…not gone at all, not gone at all, not gone at all…

_I’m here…_she whispers over and over to his very mind. _I’m here…_

“I love you,” she breathes against his lips, and with the next sway of her hips, pleasure breaks through him, swiftly triggering her own.

And for a moment, one shining moment, there is no more pain at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 7 was supposed to conclude this story, but as you may have noticed, it became quite long, and I still have a couple of scenes to write to wrap this up. An epilogue of sort shall come, then, hopefully sooner rather than later.
> 
> Any feedback from you would be much, much appreciated, and more helpful than you know ♥


	8. VIII.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an epilogue.

**VIII.**

There is _no_ talking to the stubborn git. Quite literally at the moment.

He’s disappeared under the console after their last foray out of the TARDIS, when he’d yet again attempted to find Rose, only to be told by her mother that while Rose had indeed come home, she had also gone up to join her husband.

Three hours ago.

The Doctor’s excuse for hiding amongst mechanical components instead of _talking_ about his feelings is that forcing the TARDIS through the fabric of several dimensions to get to this universe has damaged some essential circuits, which must be fixed and reinforced before they take their trip back. It’s all a load of crap to Donna, who _knows_ the TARDIS is absolutely fine, but she gets it.

His mood is bordering on vile every time he interacts with her, now, and she’s long ago reached the end of her rope when it comes to being patient and compassionate while he’s being an absolute arse.

But she gets it.

Still, she needs air.

She remains in the entrance hall, hoping to intercept Rose or that husband of hers, keeping herself busy for a while by examining the various family photographs that have been hung to the walls, quite a few of them featuring the Doctor she more or less gave life to.

It is…_bizarre,_ to see him in such mundane, domestic situations, but she can’t deny that there’s something heart-warming about it.

For one of them, anyway.

Donna becomes aware of the pair walking down the stairs about the same time they become aware of her, standing in the hall.

She’s barely started taking them in, especially him, that his face is scrunching up in a familiar glower.

“Don’t start,” he tells her as they come to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, hand in hand, their sides pressed together.

While the Doctor is looking (scowling) at Donna, Rose’s eyes are fixed on the TARDIS.

“You could at least wait until I’ve made some kind of derogatory comment before you go all frowny face on me,” Donna notes.

“Just being pre-emptive,” he says – and really, he’s not wrong; she _does_ want to make some kind of derogatory comment.

He looks a lot better than he did when they found him a couple of days ago, and she has no doubt that the quiet human currently squished to his side is highly responsible for it, but he’s a long way from looking healthy. His now beardless face looks even gaunter than it did before, and his clothes hang loosely from his lanky frame. From the way he holds himself, she can also tell that he’s…achy.

But he’s alive, alert, and sober.

Donna brings her gaze back to Rose, who is still staring at the TARDIS, her free hand now up to her face, distractedly nibbling on the nail of her thumb.

“He’d like to see you before we go,” Donna tells her, seeing no point in beating around the bush. When the young woman turns her focus on her at last, she continues: “It’s about your safety. Yours and your baby.”

The way they both stare at her at these words makes it obvious they need answers. Donna decides to be honest, explaining how she and the Doctor had gone back to the ship where Rose and her team were held captive.

“As far as we can tell, the Hyrovingians’ beliefs are not founded on anything substantial. Unfortunately, like any group of people with extreme views, they shouldn’t be taken lightly either, especially after what they’ve already done to get to you, Rose.”

The look on the Doctor’s face is chilling, his eyes almost hollow with the remnants of his pain, all the while giving out vibes of pure _fury_ Donna is only too familiar with.

So is Rose.

She’s shifted against him, her hand now up to his face, pressing her fingers lightly to his clenched jaw. He looks down at her, staring at each other for several long seconds, clearly communicating without words.

“The Doctor, he’s got something for you,” Donna eventually says, interrupting whatever wordless conversation they were having. “It’s probably best if you go in alone,” she tells Rose. “Sorry,” she adds to her metacrisis twin.

The Doctor clenches his jaw again with a vague shrug of his shoulders, his entire frame stiff with tension. “Can’t say I’m very fond of the man either, right now.”

He quickly refocuses on Rose, carrying on with their shameless, wordless chit-chat the moment their eyes meet, and really, Donna can see why it would drive Jackie crazy. If anything else, it doesn’t last long, Rose eventually leaning against him to press a kiss to his shoulder while he briefly buries his nose in her hair, before he releases her hand, and she takes the few steps to the TARDIS.

Rose raises a hand to knock, but the door opens on its own, clearly welcoming the visitor. A couple of seconds later, she’s disappeared inside.

The Doctor isn’t looking at the TARDIS anymore, standing still at the bottom of the stairs, hands deep in the pocket of his trousers. The longer she peers at him, the more physical signs Donna takes in, from his faint shivering to the hunch of his shoulders.

“Stop it,” he tells her.

“I can’t help it,” she replies. “You look…” she pauses, trying to come up with a word that could properly describe his state. “…terrible,” she concludes – because really, he’s a mess.

“Thanks,” he says, sardonically.

They actually hold each other’s gaze for a moment, until it becomes too much for him, and he has to look away.

“I suppose I _should_ thank you,” he eventually speaks again, his voice lower and more sincere. “I’ve been told you’re partly responsible for saving my arse.”

She tilts her head, making a face. “More like, ‘exclusively’ responsible. I won’t sell myself short when it comes to arse-saving.”

After another long silence, he looks back at her. “I’ve missed you.”

Donna cannot help but smirk, genuinely touched by this admission. “Being part human’s really turned you into a softie, hasn’t it?”

His ears take on an interesting shade of pink as he looks away with a small scowl. “Forget I said anything.”

“I’m allowed a bit of teasing,” she tells him, kindly enough. “It’s a tad odd for me, though. I want to say ‘I’ve missed you too’, but…I’ve actually been with you the whole time, if you know what I mean.”

“Right,” he says, curtly.

“Are you…pouting?”

He shakes his head a little, but he definitely is pouting.

Donna takes pity on him, the way she often does, no matter the incarnation, walking to him and entrapping him in a tight hug before he’s had a chance to move.

He stands stiff for a moment, before he gives in, squeezing her back.

“Alright, that’s enough,” she soon says, releasing him with a bit of a grimace. “You’ve always been alarmingly skinny, but this is almost revolting.”

She’s tempted to say more, but the sheer exhaustion in his eyes as he looks down at her gets the best of her, her compassion winning over.

“You’re gonna be alright, Spaceman?”

He gives a shrug of his shoulders. “You know me. I’m always alright.” The dishonesty in this statement is such that all she has to do is stare at him for a few seconds before he caves. “I’ll be okay,” he answers quietly. “I just…” he swallows hard, closing his eyes. “I did miss you. I really could have used you, these past few weeks.”

Donna gives his arm a squeeze, and he reopens his eyes, the rawness of his grief still coming out of him in waves. She suspects it will take quite some time and a _lot_ of Rose-shaped-hugs before he allows himself to truly accept the fact that what happened was a terrible nightmare.

“I most certainly would not have let you get away with this amount of wallowing,” she concurs. “But as it turned out, I was already busy looking after a Doctor with a broken heart.”

He swallows hard, giving a short nod of his head. “Fair enough,” he breathes out, his eyes stopping on the TARDIS. “I suppose you’ve got your work cut out for a while, eh?”

It’s her turn to shrug. “We’ll keep busy. Maybe take that trip to Mars he’s been talking my ears off about for weeks. Should distract him for a bit.”

“Lucky him,” the Doctor says, but there is nothing but sympathy in his voice.

“Yeah,” Donna says, sadly. “Lucky him.”

…

He senses Rose’s presence in his TARDIS more than anything else, just before his ship starts nudging at his mind to confirm her entrance.

He doesn’t move, at first, still hiding under the console; despite having waited nearly a whole day to see her again, now that she’s within reach, he’s not entirely sure he can go through with this.

Because no matter what is said, or done, this is it.

“Doctor?”

She sounds hesitant, and more than a little nervous herself.

He pushes down on whatever is trying to claw its way out from between his hearts, extracting himself from his hiding place under the console, quickly springing back to his feet. He spots her easily enough, standing near the jump seat.

Their gazes meet, and lock.

"Donna said you were leaving."

He should say something, _anything_.

He can’t.

No one has ever rendered him as tongue-tied as this one particular human.

Unable to speak, he acts, sinking a hand in one of his pockets instead, rummaging for what he’s put in there at some point during the last twelve hours, eventually pulling out what he was looking for.

The thin golden chain dangles from his fingers, and Rose stares at the small, blue stone that hangs from it, her brow creased in confusion.

“It’s a perception filter,” he explains quietly, his voice low and oddly thick. “I’ve designed it so that…” He swallows hard. “As long as you’re wearing it, it’ll keep you both safe from anyone or anything intending to take you from your home again.”

Her eyes shifts from the necklace to meet his gaze; she knows who he meant by ‘both’.

Unable to maintain eye contact, he looks down, using his free hand to search his other pocket, soon extracting the second artefact he’d carefully crafted during the night, holding out the tiny bracelet, which is ornamented with a similar looking stone.

“Once you…” He has to stop again. “This is for your child. For…protection.”

Rose has come closer as he spoke, now standing in front of him. She reaches out for the bracelet first, rolling the small gemstone between her finger and thumb. When she looks back up at him, her eyes are filled with tears.

Without a word, he gently passes the chain over her head, until the stone is resting upon her heart.

Both _his_ hearts thump within his chest as pain carves itself deeper and deeper in that place in between, his very soul crushed by the suffocating finality of this moment.

“Rose, I – ” he tries, the way he always does.

And as always, the words refuse to come out, refuse to be let out, his face constricting in frustration and something close to agony.

Her arms are around him, then, wrapped tightly around his neck, pulling him down to her.

He doesn’t hesitate, giving in at once, responding to her embrace the way a drowning man craves for air. He squeezes her to him with equal force, his nose buried in her hair, letting her scent invade his lungs with every single one of these saving gulps he takes.

“’t’s alright…” she whispers in his ear, her fingers curled in his hair. “It’s okay, Doctor. Whatever you’re trying to say…he says it often, and more than enough for the two of you.”

It hurts. But there is relief in that pain, because…

She knows.

He nods against her, allowing himself to believe just a little bit longer, to hold her just a little bit tighter.

When they pull away, eventually, there are tears on her cheeks, yet she’s the one who raises a hand to his face, and he leans into her touch as she searches his eyes.

“Goodbye, Doctor,” she whispers.

He swallows hard, forcing the words passed the hollow in his chest.

“Goodbye, Rose.”

Her warmth leaves his skin, and he closes his eyes, incapable of watching her walk out of his life for good.

Disconnected even from his time sense, he doesn’t know how much time has passed when he feels another hand on him; it rests gently on his back, just aware enough to know who is now standing by his side.

He reopens his eyes and meets Donna’s gaze, as she looks up at him with unwavering sympathy. While he usually cannot stand having anything close to pity directed his way, he’ll take it, today.

She can tell, too.

“Onwards?” Donna asks him quietly, tilting her head towards the console.

The Doctor nods, slowly, reaching out for the lever with a weary hand.

“Onwards.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ….yay, I guess?
> 
> I always knew this wouldn’t end on a happy note for this poor boi, but I still managed to make myself very sad. I’m off to continue [my rewrite of Journey’s End](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21889825), now, in which Rose stays with BOTH OF THEM because that’s how it should be.
> 
> Anyway, it’s a wrap for this particular story. Thank you so much for coming on this sliiiightly painful journey with me, any last feedback from you would be more than lovely ♥


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